Professor Melanie Plesch serves as Professor in Music (Musicology) at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. She obtained her PhD in Historical Musicology from the University of Melbourne in 1998, with a dissertation entitled 'The Guitar in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires: Towards a Cultural History of an Argentine Musical Emblem.' She also holds degrees in music performance (classical guitar), music education, and musicology from institutions in her native Argentina, including graduation from the Juan José Castro Provincial Conservatory.

Plesch's research examines the intersections between music, politics, and society, focusing on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Argentine art music, its connections to vernacular and popular music, literature, and visual arts, musical nationalisms, topic theory, and rhetorical efficacy in Latin American art music. Her publications feature articles in leading journals such as The Musical Quarterly, Acta Musicologica, and Patterns of Prejudice. Key works include 'Resisting the Malambo: On the Musical Topic in the Works of Alberto Ginastera' (The Musical Quarterly, 2019), 'The Topos of the Guitar in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Argentina' (The Musical Quarterly, 2009), 'Una pena extraordinaria: tópicos disfóricos en el nacionalismo musical argentino' (Acta Musicologica, 2014), 'Demonizing and redeeming the gaucho: social conflict, xenophobia and the invention of Argentine national music' (Patterns of Prejudice, 2013), 'La lógica sonora de la generación del 80: una aproximación a la retórica del nacionalismo musical argentino' (2008), and 'From ‘abandoned huts’ to ‘maps of the pampas’: the topos of the Huella and the representation of landscape in Argentine art music' (2018). She has edited monographs, such as those honoring Gerardo Huseby, and journal dossiers on topic theory for the Portuguese Journal of Musicology (2017) and Latin American music for Música e Investigación (2020). Plesch has received international research grants, including a University of Melbourne Early Career Research Grant, and held a 2015 research visitorship at the University of Oxford for Reinhard Strohm’s Balzan Project 'Towards a Global History of Music.' In 2019, she was elected a corresponding fellow of the Argentine National Academy of the Arts.

Professional Email: mplesch@unimelb.edu.au