Leah Batstone is a historical musicologist working at the intersections of art music, politics, and philosophy in Central and Eastern Europe. She has published widely on composer Gustav Mahler, the topic of her first book, and a scholar of art music in Ukraine. In June 2024, she completed a REWIRE postdoctoral fellowship, a Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions project COFUND supported by the European Commission, at the University of Vienna, Institute for East European History. She is currently working on her second monograph concerning musical modernism in Ukraine and a handbook to Ukraine's first woman composer Stefania Turkevych's Symphony No. 1. Her research has been published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music and Letters, 19th-Century Music, and Musicology Now, the peer-reviewed digital platform of the American Musicological Society. Along with Peter Schmelz, she is co-editing the volume Perspectives on Ukrainian Music for Indiana University Press and is currently organizing a special issue of Musicologica Austriaca on Ukraine in music history with Rutger Helmers, whose contributions came out of the international conference “Ukraine in Music History: AReassessment,” which she co-organized at the University of Vienna in May 2023. In April 2024, she also co-organized the conference “Ukrainian Musical Avant-Gardes: From the 1910s to the Present” at Sorbonne University with Louisa Chevalier-Martin. She is also the founder and Creative Director of the annual New York-based Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival.
