O.Univ.-Prof. Dr.phil.
Yvonne Wasserloos
M.A.
Yvonne Wasserloos has held a professorship in musicology at the Mozarteum University Salzburg since 2022, prior to which she was Professor of Musicology at the Rostock University of Music and Theatre. Her research and teaching focus on cultural transfer processes in the 18th and 19th centuries, music under National Socialism and right-wing extremism, and memory culture and reception studies.
Yvonne Wasserloos began her academic career at the University of Münster, where she studied musicology, modern and contemporary history, German studies (with a focus on literature), and Scandinavian studies (with a focus on Danish language and culture). She completed her studies in 1996 with a Magistra Artium and went on to earn her doctorate in musicology in 2002 under the supervision of Klaus Hortschansky. Her dissertation, Kulturgezeiten: Niels W. Gade and C. F. E. Horneman in Leipzig and Copenhagen, examined cultural transfer processes between Germany and Denmark.
She subsequently worked as a lecturer and visiting professor in musicology and cultural history at universities in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Copenhagen, London, Leuven, Lüneburg, and Münster.
In 2014, she completed her habilitation at the Folkwang University of the Arts with the thesis Music and the State: Dimensions of Interaction in the 20th Century, which was awarded the Düsseldorf Jonges Prize for Musicology (2013). From 2015 to 2018, she led the research project “Düsseldorf’s Civic Music Culture, 1818–2018” at the Robert Schumann University Düsseldorf.
From 2005 to 2017, she was responsible for initiating and developing numerous musicological and artistic projects, including the 2013 memorial concert “Welcome to Germany – ‘Degenerate’ Music”, featuring Die Toten Hosen and the RSH Symphony Orchestra.
From 2017 until the summer semester of 2022, she was Professor of Musicology at the Rostock University of Music and Theatre, where she assumed academic leadership of the Center for Femme Music in 2021. Since the winter semester 2022/23, she has been Professor of Musicology at the Mozarteum University Salzburg.
Since 2019, she has been a member of the inter-university network “Education and Democracy in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania” at the University of Rostock. She is also co-founder and co-editor of the interdisciplinary publication series Writings on Political Music History (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen), established in 2017.
In autumn 2023, Yvonne Wasserloos established the research group “Music and Power – Dimensions and Context” (AMUM) at the Mozarteum University, which she has been leading and developing ever since. In November 2025, she was awarded the “International Grand Prize for Research and Science” by the City of Salzburg’s Cultural Fund in recognition of her outstanding research achievements in the field of “Democracy, Peace Promotion and Cultural Responsibility in Science, Society and Politics”.
Research foci in detail:
- Music in social and political contexts (especially National Socialism and right-wing extremism)
- (Northern) European cultural transfer processes
- History of music education and institutions in the 18th and 19th centuries
- Memory culture and reception studies
- Political popular music
- Occupation music in Denmark (1940–1945)
Teaching focus
- Historical musicology (14th - 21st centuries)
- Systematic musicology (music sociology)
- Interdisciplinary teaching
- Applied musicology (knowledge transfer; links between scholarship and artistic practice)
Her teaching project “LONG PLAY – The Long Work” is included in the Austrian “Atlas of Good Teaching” (Federal Ministry for Women, Science and Research).
https://gutelehre.at/projekt/long-play-das-lange-werk-1
See here for further details of her achievements in academia: Leistungen in Forschung, Lehre sowie Wissenschaftsorganisation und –vermittlung