Emma Schrott © private
Emma Schrott is a pre-doctoral researcher at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna as part of the ERC funded interdisciplinary research project “GOING VIRAL. Music and Emotions during Pandemics (1679-1919)”. She has studied musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Vienna, Sorbonne Université and the University of Oxford, where she graduated with distinction in 2023 as a St Hugh’s College scholarship recipient. Her research has focused on the multifaceted roles that music plays in the emotional and embodied responses of people during times of crises, from exploring sonic affects on TikTok aimed at political mobilization during COVID-19, to investigating socio-cultural dynamics of communal electronic dance music practices within a resistance movement in wartime Ukraine. Additionally, Emma has worked in research at the New York-based Leo Baeck Institute, conducting oral history interviews and navigating historical narratives surrounding Austrian-Jewish emigration to North America.
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Under the supervision of Professor Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild, Emma’s doctoral thesis, provisionally titled “Emotional Echoes: Music and Emotions During the Spanish Flu Pandemic in Vienna (1918-1919)“, delves into sound and music related dimensions of emotional practices and the transformation of musicking throughout the trajectory of the Spanish Influenza in Vienna. Her study aims to make significant contributions to the tripartite nexus between music, emotions, and pandemics by exploring the diverse functions music assumed in emotional engagements with the ‘Great Influenza’, fostering interdisciplinary exchange across a spectrum of disciplines interested in the histories of culture, emotion, and medicine. Building on combined approaches of the history of emotions and the history of the senses, the research seeks to enrich nascent cultural-historical perspectives on the 1918/1919 Influenza. Grounded in the praxeological conceptualization of ‘emotional practices’, emotions are examined as culturally and socially situated phenomena, adopting a pluralistic standpoint on human music making while considering the human being as dynamically biocultural.