Lena van der Hoven is Professor for Music Theatre at the University of Bern since 2022 and has been Assistant Professor for Musicology at the University of Bayreuth since 2015. She received a PhD in Musicology from the Humboldt University of Berlin for a dissertation on the Politics of Musical Representation in Prussia from 1688 to 1797. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Since 2016 she has been a member of the Young Scholars’ Program of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Through the EUR∞SA-Program she won a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Africa Open Institute in Stellenbosch (2017-2018). In 2018 she received the Scientific Award of the University of Bayreuth for her research on South African Opera.

Her research interests include the diverse entanglements of opera and music theatre with politics and their function in societies. Her present focus for her Habilitation project lies in contemporary South African opera productions, with a special interest in the transformation of the genre in the socio-political context. She is also a member of the DFG project ‘Opera buffa as a European Phenomenon. Migration, Mapping, and Transformation of a New Genre’ at the University of Bayreuth.

She was the convener of several symposia, a conference and workshop with topics as ‘Music and Democracy’ (2015), the 450th anniversary of Staatskapelle Berlin (2015-2016), ‘South African Opera Productions after the Apartheid’ (2018), and transformation processes of opera through new media and digitalisation (2019). She has presented at conferences in Germany, South Africa, the UK, Sweden, Finland, France, Italy and Brazil. Soon to be published is a volume on opera and music theatre in Africa, which she co-edited in the Boydell & Brewer series ‘African Theatre’. In this volume she also co-authored a chapter on black empowerment in the South African opera adaptations Unogumbe (2013) and Breathe – Umphefumlo (2015) from the Isango Ensemble. 

Selection of Grants and Funds

• 2019 Grant of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences for the Workshop “Oper im Wechselspiel der Medien”, Munich 2019
• 2018 WIN-UBT Conference Grant for Symposium “South African Opera productions”,    Bayreuth
• 2018 DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Congress Grant for the Conference of the South African Research in Musicology 2018 in Durban
• 2017/2018  EUR∞SA grant for Postdoc-Fellowship at Stellenbosch University
• 2017 DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Congress Grant for IFTR-Conference 2017 in Sao Paulo
• 2016/2017 Small grant, Bureau of the Equal Opportunity Commissioner, University of Bayreuth
• 2016 DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Congress Grant for IFTR-Conference 2016 in Stockholm
• 2016-2022 Grant, Junges Kolleg of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences
• 2015 Third-party grant, Hertie Foundation for the conference “What does democracy sound like?”
• 2015 Third-party grant for the Symposium of the Staatskapelle from the Foundation Preußische Seehandlung
• 2014-2015 Post-Doc Grant, Max Planck Institute for Human Development
• 2008-2011 PhD Grant, Evangelisches Studienwerk e.V. Villigst