Alice Lee is a PhD student in music history and theory at Stony Brook University. Her research lies mainly in opera in German-speaking lands during the long 19th century, with interdisciplinary focus on issues surrounding political and financial cultures. She is currently interested in the relationship between the market economy, opera houses, and singers as well as their intermediaries at the time. Alice double-majored in economics and music (BA degree) at Columbia University.

Under the guidance of Prof. Michael Walter of the University of Graz, Alice will conduct archival research, quantitative data analysis, and historical spatial analysis on Austrian opera houses and opera singers in Austria. Her project implements methods to scrutinize empirical strategies and monetary-related questions in historical developments of the art form. Through discerning long-run pervading trends or patterns, Alice is interested in uncovering the ways in which revenue and salary data can serve as temporal tracers of historical events and technological innovations. She aims to re-examine quantitative—especially financial—questions that  have been hitherto viewed more peripherally within music aesthetics.