Samantha Heinle works on the intersection of music and literature from 1800 to the present. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University with a dissertation on music as a medium of communication in three compositions on texts by Franz Kafka. Her current book project, On the Musically Kafkaesque, listens in to Kafkaesque facets of the modern condition made audible through the sonic reception of Kafka’s work. She has published articles on the political scandal caused by the literary collaboration between composer Gottfried von Einem and writer Bertolt Brecht (Musicologica Austriaca) and on the dialectical interaction of music and philosophy in Theodor W. Adorno’s musical compositions (The Journal of Musicology). Additional research and teaching interests include film music, media theory, global song cultures, aesthetics, and critical theory.
After earning an A.B. in music and comparative literature from Harvard University, Heinle was awarded a Fulbright Grant to conduct research at the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, Austria. Her scholarship has also been supported by grants from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University, and a Don M. Randel Teaching and Research Fellowship.