Wouter Capitain studied Musicology (BA) and Art Studies (research MA, cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam. In September 2021, he defended his doctoral dissertation Postcolonial Polyphony: Edward Said's Work on Music (cum laude) at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. In 2018 and 2023, he conducted extensive archival research in the Edward W. Said Papers at Columbia University, New York, which was enabled by a Fulbright Scholarship, an Edward W. Said Fellowship, and a Music & Letters Award. He edited Edward Said's posthumous book Said on Opera for publication (Columbia University Press, 2023). He has been a lecturer in musicology at the University of Amsterdam (2014-2016) and Utrecht University (2016-2023), where he taught courses in the BA and MA programs. Currently, he is postdoctoral researcher in musicology at the University of Göttingen, Germany, enabled by a Rubicon grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), and he is a guest researcher at Utrecht University. His postdoctoral research project is about "Music and Human Exceptionalism" (2023-2025) in which he investigates how representations of music in the popular arts function to distinguish human from non-human animals.