About

I am a musicologist researching the popular entertainment and music in the Portuguese Empire. I am especially interested in the ways a mass leisure culture was created and linked to the ideas of nation and cosmopolitanism. The way technologies such as recorded sound and film interacted with the urban auditory landscape under the sway of modernity is also an important part of my work, which studies how boundaries between the stage, the city’s streets and the home were crossed by an ever-changing musical repertoire. Theatrical songs, urban popular music, traditional music, film music and dance music were commodified in several media and became part of Lisbon’s everyday life, revealing a constant negotiation between local, regional, and transnational styles. Moreover, I study the role intermediality played in making popular entertainment ubiquitous.