Lola Salem

After her training and work at the Maîtrise de Radio France (2005-10), Lola Salem studied at the Lycée Fénelon, Paris (classe préparatoire) and passed the École Normale Supérieure’s entrance examination. At graduate level, she read Musicology (ENS, Lyon) and Aesthetics & Art Philosophy (La Sorbone). In 2018, she was awarded the Young Scholar Prize at the STIMU Symposium in Utretch.

In 2023, Lola obtained her D.Phil in Music at the University of Oxford, which examined the system of emplois (role types) at the Paris Opera and showed how female singers shaped operatic repertoire and institutional practice between 1669 and 1715. She currently continues her academic work as a Marshall Research Fellow.

Between 2021 and 2023, Lola worked as Head of Development at the Canterbury Institute where she remains as a Senior Reader, and held a Lectureship in French at Wadham and St Catherine’s Colleges between 2022 and 2024. In 2023, she was selected as Civic Future Fellow and later became a member of the Civic Future Leadership School. Lola has taught Prelims and FHS music papers across the University of Oxford since 2018, before joining Oriel College as Lecturer in Music in 2022.

Research Interests

Dr Lola Salem explores how early modern opera and related artistic practices were shaped by legal, economic, and political frameworks. A central strand of her work examines singers as creative agents operating within highly regulated systems. By studying casting practices, contracts, pensions, and disputes at the Paris Opera, she shows how performers influenced musical style and institutional decision-making over time.

More broadly, Lola is interested in how artistic institutions manage talent, negotiate failure, and balance artistic ambition with administrative constraint. This led her to explore questions of patronage, bureaucracy, and cultural policy — both historically and in relation to contemporary debates about the governance of the arts and the future of cultural institutions. She currently prepares a book, Artless (Polity Press), on the philosophy and political reality of the post-cultural state.

Publications

Book chapters

• ”The Louvre heist: bureaucratic patronage, managerial failure, and the post-cultural state”, Museums and Patronage: The History, Ethics, and Funding of Museums of Science and Industry (University of London Press, 2026).
• “Opera as Inheritance: Family, Business, and Mentorship at the Académie Royale de Musique”, in Insights into Family and Home (Routledge, 2025)
• “Regulating Singers’ Pensions at the Opéra: Royal Arbitrage and Administrative Law”, in The Fashioning of French Opera (1672–1791) (Brepols, 2023)

Articles

• “Sketched Smiles: Performers and Comic Repertoire at the Paris Opera under Louis XIV”, Early Music Performance and Research 55 (2025)
• “Creative Law: Singers, Roles, and Legal Disputes at the Parisian Opera”, Studia Iuridica Lublinensia 99 (2023)
• “États and the Legal Framework of Casting Singers at the Académie Royale de Musique During the Ancien Régime”, Proceedings of the KVNM-RMA Postgraduate Symposium, 3-4 July 2021 (2023)
• “Une voix incarnée à l’épreuve des sources : Marie Fel ou l’héritage renouvelé du jeu lyrique à l’époque ramiste”, Filigrane. Musique, esthétique, sciences, société (2018)
•  “Cultiver notre jardin : un apprentissage au respect“ and “Entretien avec Magali Reghezza. Refuser l’état de crise permanent”, Prémices 2 (2018)

Book Reviews

• The Critic (March 2026): David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century (Viking Press, 2025)
• The Critic (October 2025): Bénédicte Savoy’s Who Owns Beauty (Polity Press, 2025); Leslie Primo’s The Foreign Invention of British Art (Thames and Hudson, 2025); James Delbourgo’s A Noble Madness (Riverrun, 2025)
• The Critic (June 2025): Joseph Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2025)
• The Critic (November 2024): Andrew Ford’s The Shortest History of Music (Old Street Publishing, 2024)
• The Critic (March 2024): Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy (Swift, 2024)
• The Critic (November 2023): Andrew Martin’s Metropolitain: An Ode to the Paris Metro (Corsair, 2023)
• The Critic (July 2022): Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: a New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century (Polity Press, 2022)
• Revue de Musicologie, t. 207, no. 2 (June 2022): Barbara Nestola, L’air italien sur la scene des theatres (Brepols, 2021)
• Revue de Musicologie, t. 207, no. 1 (March 2021): Marcie Ray, Coquettes, Wives, and Widows. Gender Politics in French Baroque Opera and Theater (Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2020)