Panja Mücke - Biography#

Panja Mücke was born in Halle/Saale (then GDR) in 1970. After the reunification, she studied musicology, modern German literature and media studies at Philipps University Marburg. In 2000, she obtained her PhD from Marburg with an excellent dissertation on Johann Adolf Hasse’s operas for the Dresden court that also won her the dissertation award of this university. Since then, 18th century opera in the Italian style have become one of her main research fields. In 2008, she was awarded the “Venia legendi” (habilitation) at the same university on the basis of her second monograph that studied the musical and medial intersections of movies and theatre plays around 1930 with a focus on Kurt Weill, but also on other composers. During her dissertation and habilitation periods, she held positions as researcher (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) and assistant professor (wissenschaftliche Assistentin) mainly at Marburg University, but also at the universities in Bayreuth and Bonn. After her habilitation, she held a series of adjunct professorships (Vertretungsprofessor) in several German universities, but also a one-year extraordinary professorship at Vienna university (2012/13). In 2015, she started as a full professor for musicology at the State University for Music and the Performing Arts, Mannheim. From 2017-19, she was the director of it institute for music studies, and in 2019, she was elected as vice-president for research and teaching. Since 2021, she has been the president of the German musicological society (Gesellschaft für Musikforschung). Panja Mücke has published extensively on various topics. In addition to her two monographs, she has (co-)edited six edited volumes, among them one volume of the Händel handbook, dedicated to his operas, more than 50 articles and numerous contributions to handbooks and lexica. She has also been active as a co-editor for two musicological journals, “Die Musikforschung” (journal of the German Musicological Society) and “Die Tonkunst” (a journal run by a registered association, for which she also acts as a vice-president).