Barbara Dietlinger

Barbara Dietlinger is a music historian specializing in the early modern period, with a focus on the intersections of music, visual art, and print culture in shaping memory in Saxony, Bohemia, and the Low Countries. She earned her PhD in Music History and Theory from the University of Chicago, where her dissertation, “Music and Commemoration in Early Modern Europe: Visual and Sonic Intersections of Remembrance,” explored the role of music in acts of remembrance.

Before joining the faculty at UNT’s College of Music, Dietlinger served as Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Southern Mississippi. She has presented at national and international conferences, including annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the German Musicological Society (GfM), and the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.

Her article “Musical Signposts: Dutch Songs Negotiating the Peace of Münster (1648)” appeared in the 2024 spring issue of the Journal of Musicology. In addition to her work on early modern music, Dietlinger writes on opera and media, particularly television opera. One of her current research projects examines the unlikely collaboration between West German and Czechoslovak television networks in producing TV operas and oratorios during the Cold War.

Dietlinger also has a strong interest in digital humanities and quantitative historical research, holding a Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies from the University of Chicago. A native of Germany, she earned two Magister Artium degrees from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, one in Musicology and the other in Slavic Philology.