Dr. Anna Sanda
Short Bio
Since March 2025, Anna Sanda has held a postdoctoral position at the University of Würzburg (Akademische Rätin a. Z.), where she is currently working on her Habilitation (second book project) at the Chair of Musicology II: Music of Pre-Modern Europe (Prof. Dr. Konstantin Voigt). Sanda’s research focuses on the cultural-historical study of Western music, particularly in its symbolic, ritual, and cultural-political dimensions, both as repertoire and as performative practice. Her work centres on three main areas of research:
Medieval and Early Modern Monophonic Chant
Material, performative, and symbolic aspects of the transmission of Latin monophonic music from the medieval period into the early modern era, particularly within the Holy Roman Empire and its global connections (ca. 1500–1800)
Digital Edition (sequences from French sources)
Beethoven, Bonn, and Sacred Music around 1800
Repertoire and sacred musical practice at the Bonn Electoral Court during Beethoven’s lifetime
Cultural-political relations between Bonn and Vienna
Habsburg cultural policy
Ritual and symbolic representation in the Holy Roman Empire around 1800
Opera and Habsburg Studies in the Nineteenth Century:
Cultural history of the Habsburg Monarchy (ca. 1815–1914), especially the Kingdom of Hungary
Opera as a cultural-political medium of national, imperial, and cosmopolitan identity formation
Anna Sanda received degrees in Musicology (BA, MA, PhD) and Church Music (BA, MA) in Budapest and Vienna. As a DOC fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), she completed her dissertation at the University of Vienna in 2023. Her PhD thesis, Enlightened Representation on the Sacred Stage: Symbolic-Ritual Forms of Liturgical Music in the Late Period of the Bonn Electoral Court, was awarded the Dissertation Prize of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Vienna in 2024.
Her academic appointments and research positions have included the Department of Early Music at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2013–2018); the University of Würzburg (2019–2020), where she worked on the digital edition project Corpus monodicum: The Monophonic Music of the Latin Middle Ages; and the University of Vienna, where she was affiliated with the FWF project The Sacred Music Library of Elector Maximilian Franz, held a substitute assistantship (2019–2020), and pursued her doctoral research under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Birgit Lodes (2020–2023). From 2024 to 2025, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the ERC project Opera and the Politics of Empire in Habsburg Europe, 1815–1914 at the Chair of Modern Cultural and Intellectual History at Leipzig University (PI: Prof. Dr. Axel Körner).
Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Hungarian National Cultural Fund (NKA), the OeAD, the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, and Florida International University (The Wolfsonian–FIU).
