Vanessa L. Rogers

Vanessa L. Rogers teaches courses in Music History and Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and SEARCH. Prior to joining the faculty at Rhodes College, she taught music history at Wabash College and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She has also worked as Research Associate for The London Stage, 1800-1900 database, as Principal Researcher for Ballad Operas Online: An Electronic Catalogue at the University of Oxford, and has held fellowships at the University of London’s Institute for Musical Research (IMR) and the Folger Shakespeare Library. Dr. Rogers has helped to convene several international conferences, including the 2023 virtual symposium for the North American British Music Studies Association, Music and Ideas of the Popular: Reconsidering British Music and Musical Practices.

Her primary area of research is eighteenth-century English stage music, and she has written on Henry Fielding’s ballad operas, the influence of French musical comedy on eighteenth-century English popular theatre, theatre chronicler W. R. Chetwood’s adventure novels, Isaac Bickerstaff’s hit musical comedy Love in a Village (1762), and iconography and orchestral seating in London theatres in the Georgian era. Her current projects include a co-edited volume with Janet K. Page, Eighteenth-Century European Opera and Ballet from Vienna to Brazil: Essays in Honor of Bruce Alan Brown, as well as a monograph entitled Musical Comedy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Gender, Music, Identity that provides a reassessment of the 30 most-performed eighteenth-century English musical comedies of the century.

Since arriving at Rhodes, Dr. Rogers has directed dozens of local and international self-designed and faculty-led student fellowships. Currently she supervises the Refugee Empowerment Program Music and Art Club Fellowship, in which student fellows give music and art instruction to primary-aged children in the nearby Binghampton neighborhood of Memphis. 

Dr. Rogers also is the faculty director for the Rhodes Summer School in London, an intensive four-week summer program open to all majors. Students participating in this 8-credit study abroad opportunity learn about British literature, history, art (and more!) from prehistoric through contemporary times as they explore British sites, history and culture. The courses are taught by American and British professors living on-site at the University of London, Goldsmiths. For more information, contact the Buckman Center for International Education at Rhodes.

Dr. Rogers is also the Director for Teaching Mentoring in the Office of Faculty Development.