Who’s Afraid of the Diva?: A Course in Celebrity, Critique, and Creative Practice
My project as a Bacca Fellow was to design multimedia assignments that draw students into the historical, aesthetic, and political currents shaping the Italian diva’s many afterlives.
Designing a new course on the diva might sound like an indulgence in glamour—and it is—but it’s also a rigorous invitation into cultural criticism. As part of my Bacca Fellowship, I developed “The Diva: A Cultural Saga,” an undergraduate seminar that traces the diva’s many incarnations—from the sirens and muses of classical myth and the soprano of Baroque opera to royal icons, Hollywood starlets, and fandom culture today. The diva is our guide through centuries of performance, power, sex, queerness, empire, and mass media. The diva is both spectacle and spectacular. But what (or who) declares her divine?
Putting the diva in historical context took center stage in this planning, as did her geographical focus in Italy. Historically, the diva made her debut on the professional Italian stage well before similar figures emerged elsewhere in Europe. My project as a Bacca Fellow was to design multimedia assignments that draw students into the historical, aesthetic, and political currents shaping the Italian diva’s many afterlives. The midterm assignment asks students to stage a scripted interview between a team of university historians and a chosen diva (plus perhaps her lover, rival, political opponent, or most adoring fan). Dissolving chronological boundaries, the diva is asked to answer for her legacy and her critics. Think Catherine de’ Medici meets Charlie Rose, but with more glam and dramaturgy. Students collaborate on scripting, tailor the interview to a specific network, and rehearse it in class, offering reflections about how media and audience inform meaning.
The final project—“Legends in the Making”—is a film assignment with a twist. Students imagine the making-of a diva biopic. Not just the movie, but the imagined reception of that movie: Who’s producing it? What historical moment frames its release? How is the diva being (re)packaged, and why? With roles spanning director, set and costume designers, composer, casting director, and lead actress, students storyboard, script, and film two distinct scenes: a production meeting and a moment from the film itself. It’s an assignment about storytelling and mythmaking—how we continually reinvent the diva through the cultural images we create and consume.
The Bacca Fellowship has given me fresh ways to think about where women’s history, media, and the arts collide. In every class I teach at Duke, I see how attuned students are to questions of power—who holds it, who’s denied it, and how its dynamics shift like sand over time. The diva offers a vivid frame for asking big questions in this light: Who gets mythologized? Who gets iconized? Who disappears? And why does any of this still matter? Students are the first to recognize that these aren’t questions boxed in by academic contexts—they shape the cultures and practices we embody in everyday life. After all, as any diva knows, a good performance can change a room; a great one changes the conversation.
IMAGE CREDIT: Kate Driscoll
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kate Driscoll
