Lisa Jakelski received her Ph.D. in music history and literature from the University of California, Berkeley, after completing an AB in music and English at the University of Georgia. Broadly stated, her research considers how social and political practices intersect with music making after 1945; her areas of specialization include new music institutions, Cold War cultural politics, and musical life in Poland. She examines these themes in her first book, Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968 (University of California Press, 2017), which received an Honorary Award from the Polish Composers’ Union and the Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. With Nicholas Reyland, she edited Lutosławski’s Worlds (Boydell Press, 2018), a richly contextualized accounting of a composer who famously preferred to keep his life and works separate. Her future teaching and research will continue to investigate the musical cultures of East-Central Europe while also exploring a new interest in disability studies. 

Jakelski’s work has appeared in The Journal of Musicology, Twentieth-Century Music, and East European Politics and Societies, and she has presented papers at conferences throughout North America and Europe, including the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society and the International Conference on Music since 1900. She has received numerous honors and awards for her work, including the Aquila Polonica article prize from the Polish Studies Association, a 2013 summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a fellowship in 2007-2008 at the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities.

At Eastman, Jakelski teaches courses on twentieth-century music, music in East-Central Europe, and music and the Cold War. Her dissertation advisees have worked on diverse topics, including queer representation in hip-hop, North Korean revolutionary opera, pedagogical music in decolonizing Britain, and sound and technology in the Soviet Union.