Lorraine Byrne Bodley

Lorraine Byrne Bodley is Professor of Musicology at Maynooth Univeristy. She holds a double doctorate in Music and in German from University College Dublin (2000). In 2001 she was awarded the Goethe Prize of the English Goethe Society, a DAAD Young Researcher’s Award to study at the University of Freiburg and Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship which she held at the Department of Germanic Studies, Trinity College Dublin (2001–03). In 2010 she was awarded a DAAD Senior Academic’s Award and Visiting Professorship at the University of Leipzig (2010). She is the first woman in Ireland to be conferred with a DMUS in Musicology, a higher doctorate on published work (NUI, 2012). In 2013 she was an invited Member of the Internationale Schubert-Gesellschaft (Tübingen and Vienna). In 2014 she was awarded successively a DAAD Senior Academic’s Award, a Gerda Henkel Foundation scholarship and a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Tübingen. In 2015 she was elected to The Royal Irish Academy and was the first woman to be elected President of the Society for Musicology in Ireland.  In 2016 she was granted a personal chair in musicology at Maynooth University and was Principal Investigator of an IRCHSS New Foundations Scheme Public Musicology Grant. In 2017 she was appointed National University of Ireland Representative for Music for the Department of Education and in 2018 she was elected a second term as President of the Society for Musicology in Ireland.

Prof. Byrne Bodley is known internationally for her work on Schubert, on Goethe and Music, on which she has published prolifically and given over 150 international guest lectures (in German and in English) in Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Greece, Russia, Canada, USA, UK and Ireland. She has published 15 books including five volumes of essays on Schubert includingSchubert’s Late Music: History, Theory, Style (Cambridge University Press, 2016, pbk 2018) and Rethinking Schubert (Oxford University Press, 2016 pb 2017). She is currently writing a new biography on Schubert which has been commissioned by Yale University Press. Publications on Goethe and Music include: Music in Goethe’s Faust: Goethe’s Faust in Music (Boydell & Brewer, 2017); Schubert’s Goethe Settings (Ashgate 2003, pbk 2016) and Goethe and Zelter: Musical Dialogues (Ashgate, 2009, reissued 2016) which was named an Outstanding Academic Book of 2010 by Choice and has been widely acclaimed as an ‘excellent translation’ and ‘a major contribution’ to musicology and Goethean studies (Music and Letters, The Schubertian, Choice, Modern Language Review, German Quarterly). She has written over 50 articles and book chapters reflecting her interest in Music and Culture which have appeared in the German Quarterly, Music and Letters; The Musical Times; Musiktheorie, Nineteenth Century Music Review, Oxford German Studies and Publications of the English Goethe Society. She has also edited a major international Festschrift of 40 essays: Music Preferred: Essays in Musicology, Cultural History and Analysis in Honour of Harry White (Vienna: Hollitzer Verlag, 2018). 

A large part of Prof. Byrne Bodley’s work includes public outreach including an invitation to curate a pre-concert lecture series on Schubert Symphonies performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Gustavo Dudamel (2017). Her critical edition of Eberwein and Goethe’s melodrama, Proserpina, was premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra (2007), toured in Germany by the Thüringer Symphoniker (2010) and most recently perfoemed by the Munich Symphony Orchestra in 2016. She has published critical editions of music by her husband, Seóirse Bodley including A Community of the Imagination: Seóirse Bodley’s Goethe’s Settings (Carysfort Press, 2013); A Hazardous Melody of Being: Seóirse Bodley’s Song Cycles on the Poems of Micheal O’Siadhail (Carysfort Press, 2008),  Seóirse Bodley: Three Congregational Masses (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2005) and is very active in the promotion of his work. In recent years has Prof. Bodley has written the first position paper on music published by the Royal Irish Academy (2018) which was launched by the Minister for Education at the Royal Irish Academy (June 2019). Prof. Byrne Bodley is a very committed teacher both within and beyond Maynooth, where she is Director of Postgraduate Studies, and has supervised over 50 graduate students and successfully mentored 12 doctoral and 2 postdoctoral projects to completion.