Research
Research interests
- Music, empire, and diplomacy
- Music theatre
- Early modern cultural history
- Digital Humanities
Current research
Austin recently completed a monograph entitled Music Theatre and the Holy Roman Empire: The German Musical Stage at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2022). This book draws on a wealth of archival sources and digital tools to uncover how material and discursive networks mediated an entangled web of Central European theatres—networked by postal communication and mobility—that served as preconditions for a shared musico-theatrical culture. He explores the extent to which the Holy Roman Empire delineated and networked a cultural entity that found expression through music for the German stage. Austin's other recent work appears in book chapters and with A-R Editions, Eighteenth-Century Music, Journal of Musicology, Music & Letters, and Journal of War & Culture Studies. His article 'The Imperial Coronation of Leopold and Mozart, Frankfurt am Main, 1790' (2017) won the Mozart Society of America's Marjorie Weston Emerson Award, and his essay 'The Legacy of "Ariadne" and the Melodramatic Sublime' was a winner of the Music & Letters Centenary Prize Competition. Austin often creates editions of music long since heard for performance and have worked with student ensembles to stage the modern premieres of such works in public concerts in the US, UK, and Germany. His edition of the melodrama Philon und Theone (1779) was recently used to stage its world premiere in Vienna (2021) as was planned, but never realized in the eighteenth century. Together with Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University, Canada), Austin is currently editing the Cambridge History of German Opera to the Early Nineteenth Century and he serves as reviews editor for the journal Eighteenth-Century Music.