Hilary Poriss received her B.A. from Bates College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in music history from the University of Chicago. Her primary research interests are in the areas of 19th-century Italian and French opera, performance practice, diva culture, and the aesthetics of 19th-century musical culture. She is the author of Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville (Oxford University Press, 2022) , and the co-editor of Fashions and Legacies of Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and of The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Her articles and reviews have been published in 19th-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Verdi Forum, Journal of British Studies and other musicological books and journals. At Northeastern she teaches survey classes in music history, as well as courses in opera history, the history of the music industry, and theories of performance. Poriss has held fellowships from the American Academy in Rome (2006-2007), the Franke Institute for the Humanities (2004-05), Columbia University Society of Fellows in the Humanities (2001-02), the American Association of University Women (1999-2000), and the Gladys Kriebel Delmas Foundation (1999 and 2002). Most recently, she has received a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (2013-2014) to work on her newest project, a biography about the nineteenth-century diva Pauline Viardot (1821-1910). Poriss has taught previously at the University of Cincinnati, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University.