Professor Alexandra Wilson studied at Newcastle University and Royal Holloway, University of London. She was a Junior Research Fellow and Lecturer in Music at Worcester College, Oxford and subsequently the Joanna Randall-MacIver Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. In 2005 she was appointed to a lectureship at Oxford Brookes University, where she worked until 2024, latterly as Professor of Music and Cultural History.  

Professor Wilson is a musicologist and cultural historian, with a particular focus on opera and operatic culture. She was awarded the American Musicological Society's Lewis Lockwood Award, a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. Her books include The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity (CUP, 2007), Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain (OUP, 2019), Puccini’s La bohème (OUP, 2021), and an edited collection, Puccini in Context (CUP, 2023). She is a regular cultural commentator, frequently writing for national newspapers and magazines, appearing on the BBC, and working with all the UK’s major opera companies. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2022.