Rate My Professor Sanna Pederson

Dr. Sanna Pederson serves as the Mavis C. Pitman Professor of Music and Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma School of Music, a position she has held since 2001, with promotion to full professor in 2014. She also acts as Area Chair for Musicology. Pederson earned her Ph.D. in Music from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995, with a dissertation titled “Enlightened and Romantic German Music Criticism, 1800-1850,” and her B.A. in Music and English from Oberlin College in 1985. Her prior academic appointments include Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University from 2000 to 2001, Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bates College from 1997 to 1998, and Instructor at Macalester College in spring 1993.

Pederson's research focuses on German music history and culture in the nineteenth century, including chamber music in Berlin from 1870 to 1910 with emphasis on the Joachim Quartet concerts, and the aesthetic theories of Richard Wagner regarding love, sex, and gender. She has examined the reception of Beethoven through nationalism, gender studies, narrative theory, and historiography, alongside topics in romanticism, the concept of absolute music, and the history of musicology. She teaches graduate seminars on aesthetics, Beethoven and Schubert, the Classical Era, Romanticism, chamber music, and the symphony. Notable publications include “Beethoven and Masculinity” in Beethoven and His World (Princeton University Press, 2000), “Defining the Term ‘Absolute Music’ Historically” in Music & Letters (2009), “Professor Joachim and his Pupils” in The Creative Worlds of Joseph Joachim (Boydell & Brewer, 2021), and eleven entries in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Additional works encompass “A. B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life and German National Identity” (19th-Century Music, 1994) and “Romantic music under siege in 1848” (1996). Pederson held the Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2005-06 and served on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Musicological Society from 2007 to 2013.