Univ.-Prof. Dr. Birgit Lodes

Birgit Lodes studied in Munich at the Hochschule für Musik and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (PhD 1995, Habilitation 2002), and was a visiting scholar at UCLA (1988/89) and Harvard University (1992/93). In 2004, she was appointed Professor of Historical Musicology at the University of Vienna, where she has served several terms as Department Chair and currently holds the position of Director of Studies for Musicology. She was elected a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2008 and a member of Academia Europaea in 2013. In 2025/26, she held the Austrian Distinguished Visiting Professor at Stanford University. 

Her research focuses on music and musical life in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Beethoven and Schubert, music historiography, and the roles of women, nobility, and religion for composing and musicking. Her publications have appeared widely in international edited books and journals, including the Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, Die Musikforschung, Die Tonkunst, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, Imago musicae, Journal of New Music Research, Journal of the Alamire Foundation, Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, The Beethoven Journal, The Musical Quarterly, and Troja. Since 2016, she has been developping the research website Musical Life of the Late Middle Ages in the Austrian Region together with Reinhard Strohm (Oxford) and Marc Lewon (Basel). Her editorial output include twelve books, among them several co-edited volumes; the position of editor-in-chief of Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich; and editorships of the series Wiener Forum für Ältere Musikgeschichte, Wiener Veröffentlichungen zur Musikwissenschaft, and Musik am Bonner kurfürstlichen Hof. 

Among the several major research projects she has directed are Ludwig Senfl: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works and Sources and The Music Library of Maximilian Franz, Elector of Cologne. She currently leads Singing Maximilian. Musical and Cultural Networks at Court and Beyond, within the interdisciplinary SFB Managing Maximilian: Persona, Politics, and Personnel through the Lens of Digital Prosopography. 

To date, she has supervised 57 master’s theses and 26 doctoral dissertations, with a further 12 currently in progress. Her expertise has also made her a frequent interviewee for newspapers (Die Zeit. F.A.Z.), radio broadcasters (ORF, Deutschlandfunk, BR, WDR), and television documentaries, most recently two for the BBC and ZDF, marking the bicentenary of Beethoven’s death in 2027.