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 cultural transfer.
During the 2023-2024 academic year, she was a Junior Humboldt Fellow at the University of Bayreuth, where she started the project ‘Oper übersetzt: Vom Text zur Bühne,’ which takes a cultural historical and performative approach to German translations of French opera in early nineteenth-century Bavaria. Together with Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild (University of the Performing Arts, Vienna) and Abby Gower, 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) financially supported by 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. This resulted in April 2021 in a guest edited issue of the Journal of War & Culture Studies, which collated a selection of papers from the opening conference at Magdalen College (18th–19th September 2019).
She regularly presents her work at major international conferences. Articles have been published in various edited volumes and journals such as Cambridge Opera Journal, French Historical Studies, Early Popular Visual Culture, and so on. At present, she is preparing a book about the role of opera in elite identity formation during Napoleon I's reign, 1799-1815.
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.