Clara Nicolay - art historian
Clara Nicolay is a university assistant in the Department of Arts and Musicology since October 2025. In her dissertation Between Stage and Canvas: Theatrical Events, Artistic Production and Network Formation in Florence around 1600, she examines how artists around 1600 incorporated performative practices, such as those in academies or confraternities, into their work.
Elena Minetti - Musicologist
From November 2025, Elena Minetti will join the team at the Section of Musicology as a university assistant with a doctorate. Her current research project is dedicated to the analysis of posthumous finalisations of music-theatrical fragments. Using selected case studies, she is investigating the questions of who took up and completed an unfinished work, for what reasons, with what intentions, in what context, with what compositional techniques and aesthetics and at what point in time.
Evelyn Urban - art historian
As a university assistant in the field of 18th to 20th century art history, Evelyn Urban is particularly interested in the interfaces between art, ideology and political propaganda. In her dissertation project, she aims to analyse Erna Lendvai-Dircksen's photographic work during the Third Reich.
Researchers from the two sections
Current research focuses on the architecture, sculpture and painting of historicism and modernism
Engages in various aspects of fundamental relationships between visual arts and techniques as part of research project
Active for many years in the field of modern and contemporary art
Joep Janssen's research interests lie in the interdisciplinary approach to music history, with a particular focus on the analysis of musical topoi and the connection between nature, politics and identity in the 19th century.
The current focus is on the discourses of posthumanism in relation to contemporary phenomena of musical culture
Focus on the topicality of critical theory as well as on possible connections between aesthetics and politics in contemporary art
Alice Lee's research focuses on opera in German-speaking countries in the 19th century, in particular opera houses and their market mechanisms from a financial perspective.
Her research interests lie at the interface between musical notation, sketches and compositional processes on music from the 19th to 21st centuries, with a particular focus on aesthetics, media studies and digital aspects.
Her research interests include historiography of modern art, non-Western modern and contemporary art productions, as well as art theory from the global South and postcolonial art history
In her dissertation, Clara Nicolay examines the integration of performative practices into artistic production and network formation in Florence around 1600, focussing on the body as a medium of aesthetic experience as well as intermediary, affect- and body-based practices.
After working on the reconstruction of the production system of opera in the Eastern Adriatic theaters, the current focus is on Giuseppe Tartini's "School of Nations"
In her dissertation, Evelyn Urban explores the photographic work of Erna Lendvai-Dircksen during the Third Reich, focussing on its ideological classification and the construction of identity through physiognomic and landscape elements.
Main research area is the history of opera from the 17th to the 20th century in Europe and the worldwide distribution areas of the genre
Works on the one hand on the composer Franz Waxman and his life and work "between film music and concert hall". Dedicates the new project to the digital edition of Gumpenhuber's theater chronicles