About the Speakers

MICHAEL ACCINO is an independent scholar with research specialties in nineteenth-century U.S. music and the cultural history of disability, especially blindness. He received his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of California, Davis and has held prior academic appointments at UC Riverside and Duke University. Michael’s published work appears in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, American Music, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies. His research has been supported by the NEH Summer Institute “Global Histories of Disability,” the UC Riverside Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Born 1970 in Vienna, BARBARA ALBERT is a film director, screenwriter and producer and lives between Vienna and Berlin, Austria and Germany. She had a major influence on Austrian arthouse films in the 1990s and 2000s. Her debut film NORDRAND premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival in 1999. Her subsequent films and those produced by her company coop99 were shown at festivals such as Cannes, Venice and Berlin. Among others, she co- produced the films TONI ERDMANN and QUO VADIS, AIDA?, which were nominated for the Oscar as best foreign films. After MADEMOISELLE PARADIS, released in 2017, she directed and developed two high end TV series. Her sixth feature film as a director, BLIND AT HEART, was released in 2023, again a literary adaptation. She is a Professor of directing at the Vienna Film Academy.

SÉBASTIEN DURAND, Doctor in musicology, teaches at the University of Tours (France), where he heads the music pedagogy department for musicians teaching in schools (CFMI), as well as in the musicology department of the Catholic University of the West (Angers). As a choral and orchestral conductor, he leads several ensembles. He was also in charge of the Florilège Vocal de Tours, an international choral competition. His research activities focus on the relationship between music and blindness. He is the author of several musicological publications on this subject (articles and books devoted to blind musicians, including several on Paradis).

STEFAN SUNANDAN HONISCH is a Sessional Lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Film, and a St. John’s College Scholar-in-Residence at the University of British Columbia, and previously held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship in the department. He has contributed articles to Theory & Event (with Katharina Clausius), Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, Journal of Teaching Disability Studies, Journal of Inclusive Education, and Music Theory Online, among other publications. Current projects include a monograph under contract with University of Michigan Press, and an article on disability and dramaturgy for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Disability Studies. 

KRISTIN M. FRANSEEN is a postdoctoral associate at Western University. She received her PhD in musicology from McGill University in 2019. Her first book, Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson, was published by Clemson University Press in 2023. Kristin’s current project, “The Intriguing Afterlives of Antonio Salieri: Gossip, Fiction, and the Post-Truth in Music Biography,” considers the place of unreliable sources in reception history and biographical fictions. Her preliminary research findings have appeared in the Journal of Historical Fictions and in short articles for VAN and Contingent Magazine.

WALTRAUD MAIERHOFER is a Professor of German literature and culture and also of Global Health Studies at the University of Iowa. Her research and teaching interests include German literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the present. She is especially interested in representations of health and Human Rights issues (contraception, abortion, disabilities), in intersections of historiography and fiction, ego-documents and biography, but also book illustrations and text–image relations, and she has edited several historical documents and translations. Her biography of the painter Angelika Kauffmann was published by Rowohlt in 1997 and is now in its fifth edition, while Hexen – Huren – Heldenweiber. Bilder des Weiblichen in Erzähltexten über den Dreißigjährigen Krieg (Böhlau, 2005) examines representations of historical women and images of femininity in German narrative fiction about the Thirty Years’ War from Grimmelshausen to the present. More recently, she contributed a chapter about Alissa Walser's Maria Theresia Paradis novel, Am Anfang war die Nacht Musik (2010), to Disability in German-Speaking Europe (Camden House, 2022).

SELINA MILLS is a legally blind (or as she says, illegally blind) author, journalist and disability advocate. For over twenty years she has worked as a journalist for Reuters, The Daily Telegraph, and as a Senior Broadcast journalist for the BBC. She shifted her attention to the history of blindness after working on the BBC's award winning radio documentary Disability: A New History in 2013. In July 2023 Bloomsbury published her memoir and history book Life Unseen: A Story of Blindness and the paperback will be released in the USA October 2024. In the process of researching her book she found a great sympathy with Maria Therese Von Paradis which led to the creation and co-writing the chamber opera libretto The Paradis Files with Nicola Werenovska and composer Errollyn Wallen, directed by Jenny Sealey for Graeae Theatre Company, London in 2022. Selina is dedicated to creating access to arts events and histories that help us all (sighted or not) convene together and regularly lectures on why our understanding of disability and its history matters. 

SOLVEIG-MARIE OMA (B.A.) finished her bachelor degree in church music at the Arctic University of Norway in 2021. From 2019-2020 she went for an exchange year to Stuttgart (Germany). Beside her studies Solveig worked as choir conductor and music teacher for blind children. Now based in Germany, she works with three projects which all seeks to improve the situation for blind and visually impaired musicians. Solveig became blind as a child, and therefore knows how challenging it can be for visually impaired musicians to write and distribute their music. As a consultant at the Daisy Braille Music Project, she is updated on the latest developments on digital braille music and music notation software.

STEPHANIE PROBST is Assistant Professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Trained in musicology and music theory in Vienna, Cremona, Rochester, NY, and Cambridge, MA, she held research and teaching positions at the University of Cologne, University of Cambridge (ERC-Project "Sound and Materialism in the 19th Century"), University of Potsdam, and at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Stephanie’s PhD dissertation (Harvard, 2018) investigates intersections between music theory, psychology, and the visual arts in theories of melody in the 1920s, especially in the writings of Ernst Kurth, Ernst Toch, and Heinrich Schenker. Her current research considers modes of reading and writing music that draw primarily on touch rather than vision, such as in notational systems for blind musicians, musical typewriters, melographs, and music rolls for player pianos. Stephanie served as co-organizer of the Society for Music Theory Interest Group for the History of Music Theory, and previously as co-editor of the interest group’s blog. In 2021, she joined the editorial team of the online journal Kunsttexte.de. Recent articles were published in the Journal of Musicology, Music Theory Online, and the Video-Journal of the Society for Music Theory, SMT-V.

KATHRIN RESETARITS is an author, director, actor, and script consultant. Since 2000, she has been the artistic consultant for Michael Haneke. She currently teaches script writing and film at the University of Performing Arts in Vienna and the Zurich University of the Arts. She lectures particularly on Open Dramaturgy and Constellative Storytelling for filmmakers in Austria and Germany.

RENA ROUSSIN is a doctoral candidate in musicology at the University of Toronto and an incoming postdoctoral associate at Western University. Her research focuses on Western classical music’s and musicology’s historic and contemporary positionalities towards equity-deserving populations, with particular attention to disability, gender, and race. The first half of her doctoral dissertation examines changing understandings of disability and gender in late eighteenth-century Vienna and London. Her current and in-progress publications appear with Bloomsbury, Cambridge, Oxford, and Wilfrid Laurier presses.

CHRISTOPH SIEMS (M.A.) studied musicology at the universities of Leipzig and Halle (Germany). During his studies he specialized in the music of Scandinavia. He further deepened his knowledge through semesters abroad at the NTNU in Trondheim and the Centre for Grieg Research at the University of Bergen (Norway). Since 2021, he has been a doctoral student with Tomi Mäkelä at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany). His doctoral thesis focuses on religiosity in the music of Rued Langgaard and Fartein Valen. Christoph has been the manager of the Grieg Memorial Center Leipzig since 2023, where he gained experience in cultural education and cultural management. He has been partially sighted since birth and is interested in disability history and the cultural and musical history of blind people.

EVELYN SZABO has studied musicology at the University of Vienna and KU Leuven. She has worked as a research assistant at the ACDH-CH of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and published articles in the Österreichisches Musiklexikon online, Anton-Bruckner-Lexikon online and Wien Geschichte Wiki. She is currently working as a librarian and researcher at the Music Division in the Wienbibliothek im Rathaus.

Professor HANNAH THOMPSON is a partially blind academic and activist. Her research focuses on the intersections between Critical Disability Studies and French Studies and she has published three monographs and numerous papers on nineteenth-century French literature. Hannah is currently working on creative audio description in museums, art galleries and theatres and her notion of “blindness gain.” In April 2023 she became PI on “The Sensational Museum,” a project that uses “what we know about disability to change how museums work for everyone.” Hannah writes about her place as a partially blind academic in a resolutely sighted world in her blog Blind Spot (http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.com/)

JAMIE WEAVER began teaching Music History at Steven F. Austin State University (Nacogdoches, TX) in 2008, and continues to serve there as an associate professor of musicology and coordinator of the musicology area. She holds a Master of Music from TCU, specializing in vocal performance and pedagogy. She earned her Ph.D. in music history, with a secondary area in vocal performance, from the University of Oregon. As the recipient of an International Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship, Dr. Weaver conducted her dissertation research in Bologna Italy, exploring compositional ethics of composers in Florence and in northern Italy during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. While she continues to research Italian music, her most recent projects explore the intersection between disability studies and music, particularly as these fields impact female musicians, and contributions to the emerging discipline of public musicology.