Mary Ann Smart is professor of musicology at the University of California at Berkeley. She is author of Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera and Waiting for Verdi: Opera and Political Opinion in Nineteenth-Century Italy, 1815-1848. She is editor of the critical edition of Donizetti’s Dom Sébastien. Her recent work tackles the old question of the political meanings of Italian opera in Verdi’s lifetime, during the fight for Italian unification known as the "risorgimento."