… studied musicology and philosophy at the University of Vienna, receiving his doctorate with distinction in 2016. His research interests include aesthetics and criticism, cultural history, the relations between musicology and art history, the history of science and scholarship (particularly concerning musicology), as well as the analytical philosophy of music. At the ACDH, Alexander Wilfing is part of the Department of Musicology. 

From 2014 to 2021, he held pre-doctoral (2014–17) and post-doctoral (2017–21) positions within several projects on the origins, development, and intellectual background of Eduard Hanslick’s musical aesthetics, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB). In 2017, he also held a post-doctoral fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), conducting research in Cambridge and London. From 2021 to 2023, he was an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow of the FWF at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Masaryk University Brno, and the ACDH of the ÖAW, within the project Creating an Academic Discipline. He additionally led a City of Vienna project on reviews of Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful (2024–2025).

He has held research stays at the Vossius Center for the History of Humanities and Sciences in Amsterdam (May–June 2023), where he investigated the historical development of musicology and art history; at the Department of Music, Stanford University (October–November 2023 and February 2026); and at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music (May 2026). In September and October 2026, he will serve as Visiting Professor at the University of São Paulo. He is currently leading an FWF project on Eduard Hanslick’s criticism (2022–2026), in collaboration with colleagues at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg and Stanford University, and an FWF project on the argument structure and interpretation of Hanslick’s aesthetic treatise (2025–2027), again in collaboration with the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg.

He served as editor of Musicologica Austriaca: Journal for Austrian Music Studies (2018–2025) and is a lecturer at the Institute of Musicology at the University of Vienna (2012, 2017, and regularly since summer term 2025). He serves as International Coordinator of the Music & Philosophy Study Group of the Royal Musical Association (since 2020), as a member of the advisory board of the Institute of Austrian and German Music Research (since 2020), and as a member of the editorial board of the International Review for the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music(since 2022). He also is webmaster of the Department of Musicology (since 2024). In 2025/2026, he completed the Certificate Programme in “Generative AI” at the University for Continuing Education Krems.

Full CV

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