Philip Gossett

Philip Gossett is Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Music and Romance Languages and Literatures. He is a music historian with special interests in 19th-century Italian opera, sketch studies, aesthetics, textual criticism, and performance practice. He is author of two books on Donizetti and of Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (University of Chicago Press, 2006), which won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society as the best book on music of the year. He serves as general editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (The University of Chicago Press and Casa Ricordi of Milan) and of Works of Gioachino Rossini (Baerenreiter-Verlag, Kassel). One of the world's foremost experts on Italian opera, he is the first musicologist to be awarded the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award; he also holds the Cavaliere di Gran Croce, the Italian government's highest civilian honor.