After receiving a B.A. in vocal performance from the Royal Conservatory in her native city Antwerp (Belgium), Annelies studied musicology at the Catholic University of Leuven and the Humboldt University in Berlin. She completed her PhD at Yale University in May 2018 and from 2018 until 2021 she was a postdoctoral researcher at Magdalen College, the University of Oxford. Since 2021, she is assistant professor of musicology at Utrecht University.

Annelies has experience teaching music history, theory, and musicianship courses. She especially likes interrogating the intersections between theatre, music, politics, and war (including questions concerning trauma), as well as its intersections with performance and gender. She taught MA Courses on music and war (2019), ‘“Diva”: Female Singers in the Last Century’ (2020), and eighteenth-century opera. At Utrecht, she is teaching BA courses in music analysis, history of Western music since 1600, Music and Theatre and Dutch Music Culture, and de RMA course Perspectives on Music Historiography and tutorials on a variety of topics.