Dr. Sara Beimdieke Musikwissenschaft mit Schwerpunkt Human-Animal-Studies

Sara Beimdieke studied school music and English at the University of Siegen and was awarded a PhD in Historical Musicology in 2014 with a thesis on Ernst Krenek’s television operas. She is currently working on her postdoctoral research project on musical Orientalism in 19th-century Germany as a space for religious negotiation.

She has been a lecturer at the Robert Schumann University of Music in Düsseldorf since 2022. 2023–2025: Acting Professor of Musicology at the Institute for Music Pedagogy, University of Cologne; previously a research assistant at the Chair of Historical Musicology at the University of Siegen. Board member of the Ernst Krenek Institute Private Foundation, Krems.

Her research focuses on musical orientalism, music and religion, ecomusicology, and music and media in the 20th century.

Further information at: postdocmug.hypotheses.org/sara-beimdieke

Selected publications:

• ‘Screening Guilt: West German Opera on Television as Reparation’, in: Opera Quarterly [special issue on “Opera and Television in a Transnational Perspective, ca. 1950–2000”] [forthcoming]
• An emphasis on this world rather than the threat of the afterlife. Friedrich Cerha’s Rubaiyatsettings for choir, in: Friedrich Cerha (= Musik-Konzepte, special issue 2026), ed. by Ulrich Tadday, Munich 2026 [in preparation]
• Music and Climate Change. Artistic Practice in Times of Crisis, Bielefeld 2025 (edited jointly with Julian Caskel)
• Networking – Knowledge Transfer – Orientalism. On the significance of networks for the reception of the Orient by Johanna Kinkel, in: (Elective) Affinities. Collective Cultural Action (= Music – Culture – Gender 21), edited by Maren Bagge et al., Cologne 2025, pp. 139–152
• Compositions as Narratives of the Climate Crisis, in: Sara Beimdieke and Julian Caskel (eds.), Music and Climate Change. Artistic Practice in Times of Crisis, Bielefeld 2025, pp. 115–128
• Reformation as an Artistic Principle, in: Michael Wertmüller (= Musik-Konzepte XI/2024), edited by Ulrich Tadday, Munich 2024, pp. 217–230
• Marvel’s Daredevil (USA 2003) – Conveying Sound Through Film, in: Kiel Contributions to Film Music Research 18 (2024), special issue ‘Film Music and Film Sound in the Context of their Mediation’, pp. 145–160
• ‘I set out to discover my homeland’. Homeland as practice in Ernst Krenek’s travelogue from the Austrian Alps (Premiere: 17 January 1930, Leipzig), in: ‘The Gewandhaus tickets have been booked’ – Ernst Krenek in Leipzig, ed. by Matthias Henke, Schliengen 2024, pp. 84–97
• ‘The Great Appeal of the Medium of the Camera’. Ernst Krenek’s television opera ‘Ausgerechnet und verspielt’ (= Si! Musicology Collection 2), Siegen 2017 [PhD thesis]