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Carola Darwin took her first degree in Natural Sciences (Chemistry) at Cambridge, before training as a singer at the Royal Northern College of Music, where she was awarded an MMus (Perf.). She gained her PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2009 with a thesis and a one-woman show, both on the representation of women in opera in Vienna 1900-1918. Since then, she has combined her academic career with working as an opera and concert singer in Britain and abroad.

Carola currently works at the Royal College of Music in London, lecturing in the History of Music. In 2017 her research into the Viennese composer Johanna Müller-Hermann was chosen by BBC Radio Three for their project Five Women Composers. In 2019, Carola commissioned a song-cycle Endless Forms Most Beautiful for voice and string quartet by Cheryl Frances-Hoad, with funds from Arts Council England, and premièred it at the Oxford Lieder Festival. In 2022, Carola will be broadcast on Radio 3 when Johanna Müller-Hermann is Composer of the Week. Her article ‘Odaline de la Martinez – conductor, composer, entrepreneur, leader’ is due to be published in The Routledge Companion to Women in Music Leadership in 2023.