Curriculum vitae

Carolin Krahn is Professor of Musicology at the University of Kassel, where she has held the Chair of Historical Musicology since the fall of 2024. She has been a Visiting Fellow and DAAD Fellow at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, European Recovery Program Fellow at Stanford University (fully funded by the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences), Research Fellow and GSO Leadership Academy Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome and an assistant professor of Musicology at the University of Vienna.

Before coming to Kassel, Carolin obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Vienna with distinction, the Italian qualification for the rank of an associate professor (ASN, II fascia), and won several awards (the University of Vienna’s UNIVIE International Award, a Dissertation Prize in Musicology, the Chair’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at the Stanford Music Department, and the FLAS Summer Travel Research Award by the Stanford Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies). Her undergraduate and graduate studies in Würzburg, Paris, Vienna and Stanford were supported by various scholarship programs of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation for a total of ten years and rounded off by extended research stays, summer schools as well as intensive language study in San Francisco, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Rome, Florence and most recently in Venice, various times financed by the DAAD and the Max Weber Foundation.

Her current research focuses on the cross-media representation of music and musicians as expressions of Mediterranean stereotypes in global contexts, the role of Italian opera in 20th-century everyday life (with a particular emphasis on food consumption and the interpersonal aspects of collecting), the intersection of musical aesthetics, highbrow culture, and traditionally overlooked ‘trivial sources’ in music historiography since the Enlightenment, and, more recently, ethnographic methods in music historiography. Geographically, her work centers on Italy and the broader Mediterranean as well as the Austro-German regions, while consistently integrating these areas into broader discussions of global music history production and (trans)nationalism. Having studied and worked in seven different countries and used five working languages over the years, she integrates international experience into her teaching whenever possible.

She actively collaborates with international colleagues at all career stages and serves as an advisory board member of the journal Quaderni dell’Istituto Liszt (since 2023), a steering committee member of the International Musicological Society's study group Music and Politics: Past and Presentand a member of the international study group on music and translation as part of the University of Palermo's JANUS Centro Studi e Ricerche su Traduzione e Pratiche Culturali  (both since 2025),  as well as mentor in the joint project Mentoring Hessen of Hessian universities and universities of applied sciences to advance the careers of women in attractive specialist and management positions in both academia and business. Additionally, she has been a reviewer for various institutions and publications, including the Bollettino del Centro rossiniano di studi, Philomusica on-line, European History Quarterly, the Peter Lang Group, Böhlau/Brill publishers, the Austrian Society for Musicology, the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, the European Recovery Program and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Engaging wider audiences with music history and humanities research has been an integral part of her work for over a decade, leading to collaborations with institutions such as the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Elbphilharmonie, the Grafenegg Festival, the Vienna State Opera, the Salzburg Festival, the Lübeck Theatre, the German State Philharmonic Orchestra Rhineland-Palatinate, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition, the Vienna Academy Orchestra, the Deutscher Musikrat, as well as broadcast networks such as SWR2, Kulturradio vom RBB, SRF2 and Ö1.