Janina Müller will hold a professorship in musicology at the Karlsruhe University of Music during the 2026/27 winter semester.
Her research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century music, in particular issues at the intersection of music, sound and media; the music history of the Cold War from a global perspective; and performative aspects of music in musical theatre, film and radio.
Following a research fellowship at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (2011/12), she was a research fellow at the Chair of Historical Musicology at Humboldt University in Berlin from 2015 to 2018, where she was awarded a PhD in 2019 for her thesis on music in classic film noir.
With a Junior Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), she conducted research at KU Leuven from 2020 to 2023. In her project ‘Radio Plays Politics: Musical Avant-garde and 1968 Radio Culture’, she examined experimental radio compositions and radio plays within the political context of 1968. During this period, she undertook a visiting fellowship at the Music Department of the University of Chicago (autumn 2022).
Since 2023, she has held visiting professorships at Humboldt University of Berlin and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In the summer term of 2026, she also took on teaching duties for a professorship in musicology at the State University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart.
Selected publications
- ‘The Politics of Recording: Tape, Voice, and Power in Mauricio Kagel’s Radiophonic Art’, in: The Companion to German Radio Drama, edited by Caroline Kita and Rob Ryder, Rochester, NY: Camden House, to be published in 2027
- ‘Mahler on Mount Scopus: Direct Cinema, Cold War Culture, and Leonard Bernstein’s Performance of the “Resurrection” Symphony’, in: Mahler on Screen: Life Before Visconti (Music, Sound, and the Moving Image), to be published in 2027
- ‘Listening with Lefebvre: The Sound of the Everyday in Post-war Radio Art’, in: Music & Politics 19 (Spring 2025)
- Sound as an Interdisciplinary Subject of Research (ed.), special issue of Musiktheorie. Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 40 (2025), no. 2
- ‘Trauma as Insight: Detlev Glanert’s *Caligula* – Drastic and Gnostic’, in: *Musik-Konzepte* 208/209 (IV/2025): Detlev Glanert, edited by Ulrich Tadday, Munich: edition text + kritik 2025, pp. 42–58