Frieder von Ammon
studied German and Comparative Literature and Musicology at the LMU Munich and at Reed College in Portland, OR. In 2015 he was appointed professor of German Literature at the University of Leipzig. Since 2022 he has held a chair for German Literature at the LMU Munich. He is editor-in-chief of Goethe’s letters. His current research focuses on the theory and history of poetry, the relation of literature and music, and German Literature from about 1750 to the present. Selected Publications: Thomas Kling: Werke in vier Bänden (Berlin 2020), Lyrik / Lyrics. Songtexte als Gegenstand der Literaturwissenschaft (Göttingen 2019), Fülle des Lauts. Aufführung und Musik in der deutschsprachigen Lyrik seit 1945: Das Werk Ernst Jandls in seinen Kontexten (Stuttgart 2018), Ungastliche Gaben. Die Xenien Goethes und Schillers und ihre literarische Rezeption von 1796 bis in die Gegenwart (Tübingen 2005).
Cecily Cai
is the Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Hamilton College. Her research centers around nineteenth- and twentieth-century European literature and music with a focus on German, Italian, and Polish. She is particularly interested in issues of border and identity with essays published on topics such as migration, soundscape, and late style. Her forthcoming monograph will center around the representation of exile and dissonance in modern world literature. Her research also involves the studies of literary translation and literary criticism in both the modern and the ancient world.
Peter Dayan
is Emeritus Professor of Word and Music Studies at the University of Edinburgh, having retired in 2021. He has been to all but two of the WMA’s conferences, and is the author of the forthcoming Concise Handbook of Word and Music Studies, to be published by Brill, which will be his last academic publication. His previous book, For the Love of Art (2022), is the journal of his stubborn lifelong endeavour to understand not only what art (in all media) might be, but also why we persist in loving it so much.
Ivan Delazari
is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages, Linguistics and Literature at Nazarbayev University. He is the author of Musical Stimulacra: Literary Narrative and the Urge to Listen (2021) and articles and book chapters
Axel Englund
is Professor of Literature at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm Unviersity. He is Wallenberg Academy Fellow and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His books include Still Songs: Music In and Around the Poetry of Paul Celan (2012) and Deviant Opera: Sex, Power, and Perversion On Stage (2020). Since 2023, Englund is president of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). As a translator, he has published Swedish editions of poetry by, among others, Stéphane Mallarmé, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Dylan Thomas.
Catherine Fahy
is a Research Affiliate at the School of Arts and Creative Technologies, University of York. Fahy completed her PhD in 2023, in The School of Arts and Creative Technologies at the University of York, UK. Catherine’s PhD thesis, ‘Music, Mood and Attunement in the Early Novels of Samuel Beckett’, was supervised by Professor Catherine Laws and examines the relationship between music and melancholia in Beckett’s work. In 2023, she was a volunteer on the Gladstone’s Writing Project at Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, North Wales, where she helped with the digitisation and cataloguing of William Ewart Gladstone’s letters. She currently works as a Library and Academic Skills Advisor at Coleg Cambria in North Wales and has Research Affiliate status at The University of York, UK.
Małgorzata Gamrat
is an Associate Professor at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. The main fields of her academic interests include word-and-music studies, French and German culture of the 19th century, and the methodology of interdisciplinary research, including semiotics and intermedial translation. She is the author of Franz Liszt’s Songs for Voice and Piano: The Composer’s Approach to Poetry and Music (Brill 2023); editor-in-chief of the fascicle “Musicology” (“Roczniki Humanistyczne”) and of a Translating Human Inner Life In and Between the Arts: A Semiotic Approach to the Emotions and the Process of Translation (Bloomsbury 2025).
is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Alabama in Huntsville and Distinguished Research Fellow, International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture, Justus-Liebig-Universität, Giessen. His book publications include: Benjamin heute: Großstadtdiskurs, Postkolonialität und Flanerie zwischen den Kulturen (2001) and Klang im Zeitalter technischer Medien: Eine Einführung (2017). He is co-author of A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia (with Richard T. Gray, Ruth V. Gross und Clayton Koelb, 2005) and has edited A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin (2009), as well as A Companion to Sound in German-Speaking Cultures (2023).
Rodrigo Guijarro-Lasheras
is Assistant Professor in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the University of Oviedo (Spain). His research focuses on music and literature relationships, narratology, and contemporary narrative. He has published extensively on these topics, and currently leads a research project that includes literary scholars, musicologists, and philosophers. He has been a Visiting Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Cambridge, and University of Oxford. As a musician, he has been a member of the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, and the European Youth Orchestra, performing in some of the most important European halls and festivals (Vienna, Salzburg, London Proms …), as well as an Academist at the Spanish National Orchestra.
Michael Halliwell
studied literature and music at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and at the London Opera Centre. He was principal baritone with the Netherlands Opera, the Nürnberg Municipal Opera, and the Hamburg State Opera singing over fifty major operatic roles. He served as Chair of Vocal Studies and Opera, Pro-Dean and Head of School, and Associate Dean (Research) at the Sydney Conservatorium. He was President of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (2019–2023). His publications include the monographs, Opera and the Novel (Rodopi: 2005); and National Identity in Contemporary Australian Opera: myths reconsidered (Routledge, 2018).
Christin Hoene
is Assistant Professor in Literary Studies at Maastricht University. Her research spans modern and contemporary anglophone literature, with a particular focus on postcolonial literature, word and music studies, sound studies, and queer theory. Her current work focuses on the role of music in contemporary queer literature. Christin is the author of the book Music and Identity in Postcolonial
Bernhard Kuhn
is Professor of Italian Studies at Bucknell University, where he coordinates the Italian Studies Program and teaches Italian language, culture, and cinema. His current areas of research include Italian cinema, intermediality, and, in particular, the relationship between opera and cinema. He is the author of Die Oper im italienischen Film (Opera in Italian Cinema) and several articles concerning intermedial aspects of the relationship between stage media and film.
Robert Samuels
is Senior Lecturer in Music at The Open University in the UK. His work is principally concerned with analytical theory, aesthetics, and the relationship between music and literature. His publications include Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: A study in musical semiotics (Cambridge 1995), “Narratives of Masculinity and Femininity: Two Schumann Song Cycles.” (Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music, edited by Delia Da Sousa Correa, 2006) and “Schubert’s Instrumental Voice: Vocality in Melodic Construction in the Late Works” (Voice in Words and Music, edited by Lawrence Kramer and Walter Bernhart, 2014). He is a convenor of the Literature and Music Research Group at the Open University and a member of the International Word and Music Association.
Johanna Spangenberg
studied General and Comparative Literature (M.A.) and Musicology (M.A.) at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, King‘s College London and as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. In February 2024, she received her doctorate from LMU Munich with a thesis on the relationship between music and poetry in the works of Stéphane Mallarmé and Pierre Boulez. Her research was funded by the International Doctoral Program MIMESIS, the Elite Network of Bavaria and the Stiftung Bildung und Wissenschaft. She was a research assistant at LMU Munich for several years and has been the personal advisor to the president and the executive board of the University of Music and Theatre Munich since June 2024.
studied catholic theology, German literature, classical philology, classical archaeology and sociology in Dresden and Munich. He received his doctorate in 2018 with a thesis on new religion in Friedrich Hölderlin’s late poetry. In January 2024, he habilitated in Tübingen and received the venia legendi for Modern German Literature. His second book, which was published 2025 by Vittorio Klostermann in Frankfurt am Main, deals with constructions of the ‘Reich’ in German-language literature in the interwar period (1918–1939). After working in Munich and Tübingen, he is currently a postdoctoral research assistant at the chair of Prof Dr Frieder von Ammon at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.
David Francis Urrows
is a historical musicologist and composer. Between 1989 and 2018 he taught at Hong Kong Baptist University, where he established The Pipe Organ in China Project (www.organcn.org) and directed the MA in Music program. He also taught at the University of Massachusetts, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, and Eastern Mediterranean University. Prof. Urrows is the editor of a four-volume critical edition of the works of Otto Dresel (1826–90), and author of a history of the pipe organ in China, Keys to the Kingdom (2017). His other publications include three volumes of Word and Music Studies as co-editor and editor, contributions to music encyclopedias, as well as many journal articles and book chapters. He served as Secretary of WMA in 2015–2023. His most recent book is François Ravary SJ and a Sino-European Musical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Shanghai (2021), and he is currently working on a new book about the twentieth-century concert pianist Albert Louis Faurot (1914–90), regarded as ‘the last of the China missionary-musicians’.
Dirk Vanderbeke
was Professor of English literature at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena until his retirement in 2024. His research covers a wide span of topics, e.g. James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, John Milton, evolutionary criticism, physics and literature, science fiction, fantasy, self-similarity, vampires, and comics and graphic novels. In addition, he has compiled and co-edited an annotated edition of the German translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in celebration of the Bloomsday centenary. At present he is still teaching at Palacký University Olomouc.
Laura Vattano
received a degree in piano from the Conservatory of Turin (1999) and a degree in Contemporary History at the University of Turin (2003). In February 2007,
Werner Wolf
is emeritus Professor of English and General Literature at the University of Graz, Austria, and was founding member of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA) as well as (until 2023) Vice Director of the Centre for Intermediality Studies at Graz (CIMIG). Main areas of research: literary theory (aesthetic illusion/immersion, narratology, metafiction/metareference, implied worldview), functions of literature, 18th- to 21st-century English fiction, intermediality (literature – music/visual arts). Publications include: Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzählkunst (Aesthetic Illusion and the Breaking of Illusion in Fiction, 1993), The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (1999), Selected Essays on Intermediality (ed. Walter Bernhart, 2018). He is also (co-)editor of volumes 1, 3, 5, 11, 14, 15 and 19 of the book series “Word and Music Studies” (1999–2022) and of volumes 1, 2, 4–6 and 11 of the series “Studies in Intermediality” (2006–2018).