Hilde Roos

Hilde Roos is a music and opera lecturer and researcher.

Biography

She obtained her doctorate in 2010 with a study called Opera Production in the Western Cape: Strategies in Search of Indigenisation from Stellenbosch University.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

She is the General Manager of Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (AOI) at Stellenbosch University and her work focuses on historical and contemporary representations of opera in Southern Africa with special reference to the intersection of the genre with politics and race.

She has published widely about the Eoan Group, a so-called "coloured" opera group who performed opera during the Apartheid period, and other aspects of opera and musical theatre in South Africa.

Her publications include "Indigenisation and history: how opera in South Africa became South African opera" (in Acta Academica Supplementum 2012), EOAN – Our Story (2013); The La Traviata Affair – Opera in the Age of Apartheid (2018), African Theatre – Opera and Music Theatre (co-editor, 2020), "Burgerskap onder konstruksie: Aida en Rigoletto by die Suid-Afrikaanse Republiekfeesvieringe, 1971" (2021), “Sorry. I am what I am.” The life and letters of the South African pianist and opera coach Gordon Jephtas (1943–92) (2023).

Hilde is also a founder member of the Black Opera Research Network (BORN), an international network of scholars that engage with conversations on the history, experiences, politics and practices of Black Opera.