Matthias J. Pernerstorfer

Studied theater, film, and media studies in Vienna and Munich, graduating with a thesis on the figure of the parasite in ancient comedy (2001). Received a DOC fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences for a dissertation on Menander’s *Kolax* (2003–2005; published in 2009). Subsequently worked for the Vienna Da Ponte Institute for Librettology, Don Juan Research, and Collection History (2005–2006).

Since 2007, he has been a staff member of the newly founded Don Juan Archive in Vienna, and has served as its director since 2011. He is the author and editor of numerous publications, including two volumes in the Bibliographica series on theater programs (2012 and 2015), three volumes in the Summa Summarum series—i.e., the collected writings of Reinhart Meyer (2012), Herbert Seifert (2014), and Tomislav Volek (2016, with Milada Jonášová); the encyclopedia Theater in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. From the Beginnings to the End of the 18th Century (2013, with Alena Jakubcová) and Texts on Plot Structure in *Nea* and *Palliata* by Adolf Primmer (2015, with Alfred Dunshirn). Production manager for the publication of the *Jedermann* director’s script for Max Reinhardt’s productions in Berlin, Salzburg, and New York (2 volumes, 2020) for the 100th anniversary of the Salzburg Festival, and editor of *A Model for Mozart*. *Das Serail* by Joseph Friebert (1778) to mark the 300th anniversary of the composer’s birth (2024).

An expert in providing information on the history of theater and musical theater, both through digitization initiatives and through years of collaboration with Reinhart Meyer (Documenta dramatica, in progress) and Paul S. Ulrich (Topography and Repertoire of the Theater, 10 volumes: 2018, 2022 ff.) as well as the e-book and reprint edition of Claudio Sartori’s libretto catalog (7 volumes: 2024).

My personal research focus is on religious theater in the Baroque period. I have published several essays—both bibliographic and interpretive—on religious concepts associated with the Holy Sepulcher at the Viennese court, at the Cistercian Abbey of Heiligenkreuz, and in Eisenstadt, as well as on the Piarist school theater in Horn. “Sepolcri in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy” is the title of the FWF project 10.55776/PIN4863425, on which M. J. Pernerstorfer has been collaborating as a staff member at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg since October 1, 2026.