Sadie Menicanin I joined the University of Oslo in October 2023 as a postdoctoral fellow in the Music and Nature research initiative. My research combines historical and interpretive methodologies to investigate music, space, and place around 1900, particularly as related to urban environments and ideas of nature. I attend to resonances between material places and spaces as imagined and represented in music. My work intersects with disciplines including musicology, sound and visual studies, environmental history, and cultural geography. My broader interests include music for film and visual media, sensory studies, environmental / animal / energy humanities, and modernisms.

The working title of my postdoctoral research project is "Musical-Material Encounters With the Vienna Woods, c.1870-1920." Through a variety of primary sources, I trace ideas about the Wienerwald as generated and circulated in music, iconography, and popular discourse around 1900. I work to contextualize musical depictions of this landscape within several intersecting areas: changes to urban geography and transportation, the history of tourism, and the (literal) solidification of Vienna's reputation as Musikstadt. I combine archival research and historical contextualization with close reading and interpretive methods.

My dissertation, “A Cultural Geography of Gardens in Early Twentieth-Century Viennese Opera,” newly approaches Viennese modernism by engaging with material place and designed landscapes. Bringing together historical and interpretive research, I explore connections between gardens as represented on stage and built gardens in Vienna c. 1900-1925.