The Arts and Humanities Institute, in collaboration with the Music Department,is pleased to host the international symposium Self-Borrowing in Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera: A Reconsideration. Defined as the re-use of pre-existing music in a new work by the same author, self-borrowing has received significant attention from scholars of nineteenth-century Italian opera. Whereas in the past emphasis fell mostly on close readings of individual operas, recent research has addressed this practice from a wider perspective, showing how a thorough examination of self-borrowings can provide insight into composers’ creative processes, style, and the relation between words, music, and drama. The border between self-borrowing and originality has also been questioned, and the study of self-borrowing has reinforced the point that musical detail in this repertory is worthy of analytical investigation. Still, the broader contextual and conceptual implications of self-borrowing remain largely unexplored. The aim of this symposium is to consider the practice of self-borrowing not only as a compositional phenomenon, but also as an indicator of historical and socio-cultural transformations in the industry of nineteenth-century Italian opera.