Celia Applegate, Vanderbilt University, USA

Celia Applegate studies the culture, society, and politics of modern Germany, with particular interest in the history of music, nationalism and national identity. She is the author of A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1990), the co-editor (with musicologist Pamela Potter) of Music and German National Identity (Chicago, 2000), and the author of Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn's Revival of the St. Matthew Passion (Cornell, 2005), winner of the DAAD/GSA Book Prize. She is currently working on comprehensive interpretation of musical life in Germany from the 17th century to the present, titled Music and the Germans: A History. She is Past President of the German Studies Association and Vice President of the Central European History Society.

Philip V. Bohlman, University of Chicago, USA and University of Kassel, Germany

Philip V. Bohlman is the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and Honorarprofessor at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. He is also the artistic director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, an internationally acclaimed Jewish cabaret ensemble. His research and teaching range widely, examining the intersections between and among music and religion, racism, and genocide. His work on music and nationalism includes studies of Jewish music (Jewish Music and Modernity, 2008) and of transition in the New Europe (Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe, 2011). His current book project, Music after Nationalism, is supported by a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship. His Wie könnten wir des Herrn Lied singen in fremden Lande? is forthcoming at the end of 2014. Philip Bohlman is currently Franz-Rosenzweig-Professor at the University of Kassel.

A pianist, he also is the artistic director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, a Jewish cabaret ensemble at Chicago. The New Budapest Orpheum Society has released the double-CD Dancing on the Edge of the Volcano (2002). Current projects include books on music drama in the Holocaust and a translation of Johann Gottfried Herder's writings on music and nationalism. Bohlman was awarded the Edward Dent Medal by the Royal Music Association in 1997 and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin in 2003.

Tomi Mäkelä, Martin Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

Tomi Mäkelä is a Finnish-German scholar with a wide range of interests in music, music research and education. Starting with publications on Romantic virtuosity, he soon changed over to the 20th-Century studies in the 1990s. He wrote a book on the Max-Reger-student Aarre Merikanto and participated in a German DFG-project on Music in Exile 1933–1950, and finally (now living in Germany) became interested in his cultural roots. His first book on Sibelius, "Poesie in der Luft" (2007) was celebrated internationally (and occasionally attacked in Finland) as a new view on the composer. Due to its methodological setting, it got the distinguished "Geisteswissenschaft International" Prize that is rarely given to a book on music. 2011 an English version was published. After that Mäkelä wrote the compendium Jean Sibelius und seine Zeit (2013). In the meanwhile he had also published a book on Fredrik Pacius, the composer of Finland's national anthem (2009 in Swedish, 2014 in German).
His newest contribution on the "New North", the musical culture, and music education (including the popular) in Finland after Sibelius is about to be on market in late 2014. 2013 he started in the Edvard Grieg scholarship, building up music research in Grieg's home region in Bergen, Western Norway. Mäkelä is professor of music in the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in Germany and member of the Editorial Board of both Studia Musicologica Norwegica and Twentieth-Century Music (CUP).