Eftychia Papanikolaou

Effie Papanikolaou holds a B.A. in English Philology and Literature from the University of Athens, Greece; Music Theory Degrees from the National Conservatory of Athens; and Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Historical Musicology from Boston University. Her publications (from Haydn, Spontini, and Robert Schumann to Liszt and Gustav Mahler) investigate the interrelations of music, religion, and politics in the long nineteenth century. Scholarship on music for TV and film (The Last Temptation of Christ, Mahler, Battlestar Galactica) has appeared in interdisciplinary collections. Current projects involve choreomusical analyses of contemporary ballet, and publications on the 20-year anniversary of Battlestar Galactica.

She is co-editor of Sacred and Secular Intersections in Music of the Long Nineteenth Century: Church, Stage, and Concert Hall, a collection of 19 essays that explore the interconnections of the sacred and the secular in music and in aesthetic debates of the long nineteenth century. In her monograph, Translating Symphonies and the Sacred: Choreomusical Perspectives on Contemporary Ballet (Bloomsbury, forthcoming), she offers an innovative exploration of four contemporary ballets set to symphonic and sacred works. Using methodological lens borrowed from choreomusicology, she traces the reciprocal relationships between music and movement.

Papanikolaou has presented papers at numerous national and international conferences, both musicological and interdisciplinary in scope. In the past twenty years she has contributed hundreds of program notes to professional ensembles and concert events, and liner notes for CD publications. With a strong commitment to public musicology, she is frequently engaged as a pre-concert presenter of chamber and symphonic music. For five years she was the primary lecturer for the Festival Series at the College of Musical Arts (2009–14). Since 2015 she has presented the highly popular pre-performance talks at the Toledo Opera, she has appeared as lecturer at the Toledo Museum of Art, and as guest on WGTE’s “SymphonyLab,” the podcast of the Toledo Symphony Orchestra.

She has been the recipient of an NEH Summer seminar fellowship for work on opera; a Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship from BGSU’s Institute for the Study of Culture and Society; and a Technology Innovations Course Redevelopment Grant to from the Ohio Learning Network. She has been recognized for her work as thesis advisor with the “Distinguished Thesis Award” from BGSU’s Graduate College, and the Outstanding Thesis/Dissertation Award from the College of Musical Arts.

She has served as elected member on the Council of the American Musicological Society; chair of the Program Committee for the annual AMS conference (2024–25); chair of the AMS Committee on Membership and Professional Development; treasurer and member of the Program Committee of the AMS Midwest; member of the Committee on Career-Related Issues of the AMS; and currently as an appointed member on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2026–28). Between 2018 and 2026 she was on the Executive Committee of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music. She served on the scientific committee of the conference “Music and the Spiritual since the French Revolution,” organized by the Accademia musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy (2022), where she also delivered a keynote address. Her previous teaching appointments include Wellesley College, the Longy School of Music, Miami University, and Harvard University (Teaching Fellow).

At the College of Musical Arts, Papanikolaou has served as the Musicology Area Coordinator (since 2009), and as the Graduate Student Advisor for Musicology/Composition/Theory (2010–2025).

Selected publications

Books:

Translating Symphonies and the Sacred: Choreomusical Perspectives on Contemporary Ballet (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

Sacred and Secular Intersections in Music of the Long Nineteenth Century: Church, Stage, and Concert Hall. Edited by Eftychia Papanikolaou and Markus Rathey. Lexington Books, 2022.

Selected articles and book essays:

“Dona nobis pacem(?): Neumeier’s Choreomusical Translation of Bach’s B-Minor Mass.” BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute (Special Issue “Seeing Bach,” edited by Erinn Knyt and Christina Fuhrmann, forthcoming).

“Consecrating the Stage: Uwe Scholz’s Choreographic Completion of Mozart’s Große Messe.” Journal of Musicological Research 44, no. 1 (May 2025): 1–21.

“Uwe Scholz’s Choreographic Conception of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.” In Beethoven the European: Transcultural Contexts of Performance, Interpretation and Reception, edited by Malcolm Miller and William Kinderman, 345–370. Speculum Musicae Series. Brepols, 2023.

“Hieratic Iconoclasm: Liszt, Hanslick, and the Graner Festmesse.” In Sacred and Secular Intersections in Music of the Long Nineteenth Century: Church, Stage, and Concert Hall, edited by Eftychia Papanikolaou and Markus Rathey, 121–144. Lexington Books, 2022.

“Spontini in città: Bach e la politica musicale a Berlino.” Translated by Chiara Bertoglio and Susanna Bucher. In Bach e l’Italia. Sguardi, scambi, convergenze, edited by Chiara Bertoglio and Maria Borghesi, 61–74. Lim, 2022.

“Liszt and Religion.” In Liszt in Context, edited by Joanne Cormac, 163–171. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

“Spontini and the City: Bach and Musical Politics in Berlin.” The German Quarterly (special issue on “Music and German Culture”; edited by Caroline Kita, Francien Markx, and Carl Niekerk) 91, no. 4 (2018): 389–399.

“On the British Reception of Ken Russell’s Mahler.” In Rethinking Mahler, edited by Jeremy Barham, 163–182. Oxford University Press, 2017.

“Linking Christian and Faustian Utopias: Mahler’s Setting of the Schlußszene in his Eighth Symphony.” In Music in Goethe’s Faust, Goethe’s Faust in Music, edited by Lorraine Byrne Bodley, 183–198. Boydell Press, 2017.

Preface to E. T. A. Hoffmann, Miserere, for chorus, soloists and orchestra (English and German). Musikproduktion Höflich, München, 2015.

“Trauma as Memory in Ken Russell’s Mahler.” In After Mahler’s Death, edited by Gerold W. Gruber, Morten Solvik and Jan Vičar, 72–89. Palacký University, 2013.

“Ταυτότητα και Εθνικότητα στη Μουσική του Peter Gabriel για την Ταινία του Martin Scorsese Ο Τελευταίος Πειρασμός.” In “The Last Temptation” and Its Transformations. Edited by George Grammatikakis and Antonis Leventis, 141–154. Kazantzakis Museum, Crete, 2011.

“Whose Mourning?: Schumann’s Requiem für Mignon.” Choral Journal (Focus Issue on Robert Schumann) 51, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 18–30.

“The Art of the Ballets Russes Captured: Reconstructed Ballet Performances on Video.” Music Library Association Notes 64, no. 3 (March 2008): 564–585.

“Of Duduks and Dylan: Negotiating Music and the Aural Space.” In Cylons in America: Critical Studies of Battlestar Galactica, edited by Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall, 224–236. Continuum, 2007.

“Romanticism as Border Crossing: The Case of the Symphonic Mass.” Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism 13 (2005): 63–80.

“Brahms, Böcklin, and the Gesang der Parzen.” Music in Art: International Journal for Music Iconography 30, nos. 1–2 (Spring-Fall 2005): 154–165.

“Identity and Ethnicity in Peter Gabriel’s Sound Track for The Last Temptation of Christ.” In Scandalizing Jesus?: Kazantzakis’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” Fifty Years On, edited by Darren J. N. Middleton, with a contribution by Martin Scorsese, 217–228. Continuum, 2005.

“Aestheticism and the City: Gustav Mahler and Musical Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna.” Journal of Political and Military Sociology (Music and Politics Issue) 30, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 239–257.

Selected courses taught
Survey of Western Art Music History II, Classical -Romantic
Opera Literature
Symphonic Literature
Chamber Music Literature
Exploring Music (non-majors)

Graduate seminars:
Beethoven’s Late Music
Genre-Bending in the Long Nineteenth Century
Music Criticism Then and Now
Interrogating the Sacred in the Romantic Mass
Exoticism
(Too) HIP for Our Times
Performance Practice