Professor Parker was the Gresham Professor of Music between 2006 and 2010. He is currently the Thurston Dart Professor of Music at King’s College London. He studied at the University of London, first at Goldsmiths, then at King’s. He then taught at Cornell University, at Oxford and at Cambridge, where he was Professor of Music and served as Chair of the School of Arts and Humanities. He has held Visiting Professorships at Princeton and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was the Ernest Bloch Lecturer.
Roger Parker's work has centred on opera, in particular Italian opera of the nineteenth century. For ten years he was founding co-editor (with Arthur Groos) of the Cambridge Opera Journal, and he continues as General Editor (with Gabriele Dotto) of the Donizetti Critical Edition. He was a Guggenhiem Fellow in 1986-7, received the Premio Giuseppe Verdi in 1986, and in 1991 was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association. He has produced numerous publications but his latest book is Remaking the Song: Operatic Visions and Revisions from Handel to Berio.