Sebastian Wedler is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Utrecht University. Before joining the Department of Media and Culture Studies in 2022, he spent ten years at the University of Oxford in England, as a Departmental Lecturer in the Faculty of Music and Director of Studies for Music at Merton College (2019–22), Junior Research Fellow at St. Hilda’s College (2016–19), and a graduate student at Merton College (2012–16). From 2021–22 he also served as Convener of Master’s Studies at the Oxford Faculty of Music; in this role, he oversaw the graduate teaching and chaired the Examination Board. Originally from Germany, he took his undergraduate degree in Musicology, Law and Psychology from the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
His research concerns the history of music from the nineteenth century to the present day, issues in the philosophy of musical thought (with a focus on critical theory and ecocriticism), and the epistemology of musical analysis. In his first monograph, Anton Webern at the Dawn of Modernism (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press), he explores the complex and variegated ways in which the young Webern engaged with, and sought to contribute to, the cultural ideas and discourses of fin-de-siècle Vienna, well before the composer self-consciously embarked upon his famous ‘path’ to the New Music. His other works include articles and chapters in venues such as Music Analysis, Twentieth-Century Music, The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism, The Cambridge Companion to Serialism, and Beethoven in Context (forthcoming). He has presented his research widely at conferences in the USA, UK and continental Europe, including at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory.
He was elected Prize Scholar at Merton College, is the recipient of the ‘Link 2 Future’ Award from the Psychoanalytic Seminar Zurich, held scholarships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK and the Paul Sacher Foundation, and has been selected to deliver the 2021 Anton Webern Lecture at the University of Basel. In recognition of his teaching, he was shortlisted for Outstanding Tutor in the Humanities by the Oxford University Student Union.