Adeline Mueller is a music historian specializing in Mozart and vocal and theatrical music in German-speaking Europe around 1800. Her research interests include music and childhood, music and disability, silent film music, and marginalized composers and musicians in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. In 2024 she organized an international bicentenary symposium at Mount Holyoke on the blind Viennese pianist Maria Theresia Paradis (1756-1824). Her current research project argues for the centrality of music and music education in institutes for the blind founded in the decades before Braille, especially in Vienna and Berlin. These institutes, their music curricula and performances, and the tools and media through which their music was circulated, constituted a turning point in the cultural history of disability and special education in Europe.
Mueller's book, Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood (University of Chicago Press, 2021), examines Mozart’s role in the social and cultural construction of childhood during the Austrian Enlightenment, using evidence from his early career, his compositions for the young, and biographies and music prints that circulated in the first decades after his death. She has published articles in the journals Opera Quarterly, Eighteenth-Century Music, and Frontiers in Communication, and chapters in the edited volumes The Cambridge Companion to The Magic Flute (2023), Mozart in Context (Cambridge, 2019), and Wagner and Cinema (Indiana, 2010), among others. She is contributing chapters to the forthcoming volumes Mozart and His World (Princeton University Press) and Cambridge History of German Opera to 1820.
Mueller has presented papers at such conferences as the American Musicological Society, the Mozart Society of America, and the American and British Societies for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Previous academic appointments include Brown University (Visiting Assistant Professor, 2014-15) and New College, University of Oxford (Weston Junior Research Fellow in Music, 2011-14).
In her research and in courses such as History of Western Music, Music and Childhood, Music and Disability, and The History of Music Education, Mueller and her students consider how music circulates among performers, consumers, and audiences, especially through print, and on musical practices as sites of social reflection and experimentation.
Education
- Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
- M.A., University of Sussex
