Annelies’s major research interests are opera and other music theatre genres in the long nineteenth century (1789-1914); staging and performance practice; politics, militarism and war; music, medicine and trauma; and gender studies.
Her research explores how European music cultures developed in the wake of nineteenth-century military conflicts. She interrogates the intersections between music and war from the perspectives of translation and performances studies, trauma studies, and transnational dissemination.
During the 2023-2024 academic year, she was a Junior Humboldt Fellow at the University of Bayreuth, where she is starting the project ‘Oper übersetzt: Vom Text zur Bühne,’ which takes a cultural historical and performative approach to German translations of French opera in Bavaria during the Napoleonic Wars. Together with Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild (Vienna), she leads an international study group on Music, Sound, and Trauma, which was launched after their conference ‘Music/Sound through the Lens of Trauma’ organised at Utrecht University (July 2022) with the support of the Hofvijverkring. In 2019-2021, she collaborated with Clare Siviter (Bristol) on a project entitled ‘Theatre on the move in times of conflict, 1750-1850’, supported among others by a British Academy\Leverhulme Small Research Grant. The project started off with a conference at Magdalen College (18th–19th September 2019) and a guest-edited journal issue with selected papers for the Journal of War & Culture Studies was published in April 2021.
She has presented her work at major international conferences and articles have been published in various edited volumes, with Cambridge Opera Journal, and French Historical Studies, among others. She is also preparing a book about elite identity formation in operatic culture during Napoleon I's reign, 1799-1815.
At present, Annelies co-supervises (with Prof. dr. Beatrice de Graaf and Prof. dr. Annelien de Dijn) the PhD project 'Normalizing War-as-Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century Europe' of Dorian Hagedoorn.