Danielle Ward-Griffin specializes in the mediatization and performance of opera in the US, UK, and Canada in the twentieth century. Her book, Televising Opera: Broadcasting and Performance in the North Atlantic, will be published in 2026 by Oxford University Press as part of its Music/Media series. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Cambridge Opera Journal, Opera Quarterly, Journal of the Society for American Music, Journal of Musicology, and Music & Letters. Two of these articles have won the Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award from ASCAP, the Westrup Prize from the Music & Letters Trust, and the Ruth Solie Award from the North American British Music Studies Association. She has also contributed chapters on Benjamin Britten’s operas to Rethinking Britten, Benjamin Britten Studies, and Britten in Context. Forthcoming work includes essays in Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900 (Oxford University Press) and Screening Live Performance (Bloomsbury).
Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Society for American Music, and the Humanities Research Center at Rice, as well as grants from the Hagley Center for the History of Business, Society and Technology, the Ucross Foundation, and the Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. In 2024, along with Sara Beimdieke and Emanuele Senici, she co-organized an international conference, “Opera and Television in Transnational Perspective, 1950-2000,” sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and Villa Vigoni (German-Italian Centre for European Dialogue). She has also shared her research with the broadly public, most notably in an AMS-sponsored talk at the Library of Congress titled “Integration without Identification: NBC TV, Leontyne Price, and Opera Casting in the Civil Rights Era.”
At Rice, she teaches graduate courses and the final semester of the undergraduate music history sequence. She currently serves as the Shepherd School Faculty Fellow for the Center for Teaching Excellence.