Gundula Kreuzer, a world-renowned musicologist whose work combines extensive archival research with imaginative methodological and theoretical ideas, has been named the Battell Professor of Music, effective July 1.
She joined Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2005, and currently serves as chair of the Department of Music.
Kreuzer's multiple-award-winning first book, "Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich" (Cambridge University Press, 2010), examines the changing impact of the popular Italian composer on German musical self-perception and national identity. Her second monograph, "Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera" (University of California Press, 2018), addresses how composers since the late 18th century increasingly tried to control certain aspects of staging by embracing specific stage technologies. Her current research interests include contemporary experimental opera (particularly in the U.S.) as well as the position of opera in post-war memory cultures. A short German volume on Hindemith's "Mathis der Maler" and German cultural memory will appear next month.
Her first monograph won the 2011 Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society, the 2012 Gaddis Smith International Book Prize of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, and the inaugural Martin Chusid Award for Verdi Studies (2013). Among other grants and awards, Kreuzer was awarded the Paul A. Pisk Prize (2000) and the Alfred Einstein Award (2006) from the American Musicological Society, as well as the Jerome Roche Prize (2006) and the Dent Medal (2019), which is awarded by the Royal Musical Association for outstanding contribution to musicology. In 2015-16, she held a Research Fellowship at the Italian Academy at Columbia University, and in 2022, she was elected a member of the Academia Europaea - The Academy of Europe.
Kreuzer is also a dedicated and outstanding teacher and mentor who has worked closely with numerous students as a senior project advisor, prospectus and dissertation advisor, first-year mentor, and more. She teaches courses including "Opera, Media, and Technologies," "The Western Art-Music Tradition, 1800-1968," "Nineteenth-Century Opera and Representation," and "Women and Western Art Music." Her Opera Studies working group and her YOST (Y | Opera | Studies Today) conferences have been bringing scholars and practitioners together since 2019.
Kreuzer also values public-facing work and regularly provides program notes, lectures, and interviews for opera houses or public media, as well as participating in the Metropolitan Opera Quiz, a regular series broadcast in more than 40 countries.
An engaged university citizen, she serves as chair of the Department of Music. Previously, she served as acting chair of the Department of Music, acting chair of the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, and for three terms as director of graduate studies in Music, among other forms of university service.
She received an M.St. degree and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Oxford.
