Linda Maria Koldau, cultural scientist and journalist, is Professor of Musicology and Cultural History at Aarhus University in Denmark. She is known to a larger audience through articles in the FAZ and numerous radio broadcasts.
Linda Maria Koldau (born October 28, 1971) is a German musicologist and was Chair of Musicology and Cultural History (formerly Knud Jeppesen's Chair of Musicology) at Aarhus University in Denmark. Since 2013 she has been director of the Coastal Academy (Akademie an der Steilkueste) in Northern Germany, focusing on efficiency, conciseness and perfection in business language and communication.
Biography
Born in Munich, Linda Maria Koldau studied Musicology, American Literature, and Italian Literature at Reading University in England and Mainz University in Germany. In 2000 she finished her PhD at Bonn University with a thesis on the Venetian sacred music by Claudio Monteverdi. In 2005 she received her "Habilitation" at Frankfurt University with a handbook on women in the musical culture of the Early Modern Period. In 2006-2008 she was chair of Musicology and director of the Institute of Musicology at Frankfurt University; in 2009 she was appointed Chair of Musicology and Cultural History at Aarhus University. She is member of several international research groups and interdisciplinary networks and has published widely in several fields of musicology and cultural history. Besides her academic work, she worked as a freelance cultural journalist for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the period 1992-2002; since 1995 she has been author of radio programs for various German channels.
In 2012, Koldau resigned from her chair in protest against the low quality of education that had been enforced by the management of her department, and against the general management policies at Aarhus University, which contradicted basic principles of academic research and teaching.[1]
Koldau's protest and the disciplinary measures Aarhus University took against her led to several months of protest, numerous articles and letters to the editor in the Danish media, in which Danish and foreign academics and teachers decried the deplorable deterioration of quality and standards in the Danish educational system.[2] Koldau documented her experiences at a later stage in her three-volume documentary novel "Jante University", which is simultaneously designed as a handbook on the general consequences of New Public Management measures for a country’s education and its economy.[3] In 2013 Koldau was awarded a Marie Curie Senior Research Fellowship by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, which she used for a two-year research project on the social and political consequences of major flood disasters in the 20th and early 21st centuries. From 2013 to 2017, Koldau was associated Research Professor for Cultural History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
Work as a veterinary practitioner
In 2015-2018 Koldau trained as a veterinary practitioner (Tierheilpraktiker) and veterinary physiotherapist, specializing on veterinarian anatomy and the behaviour and medical treatment of guinea pigs. She has published several textbooks on guinea pigs and issued a number of easy-to-read handbooks and children's books on guinea pigs under the label "Cavia Publishing".
Books on Musicology and Cultural History
Die venezianische Kirchenmusik von Claudio Monteverdi, Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001, 22005
