Dr. Julin Lee

After completing a degree in Chemical Engineering at the University of Cambridge, Julin Lee went on to study musicology at LMU Munich from 2015 to 2020. Between 2017 and 2020, she worked as a student research assistant for the research group »Materiality of Musical Instruments: New Approaches to a Cultural History of Organology« at the Deutsches Museum Munich. In this capacity, she developed her own research project on Oskar Sala, the Mixturtrautonium, and the soundtrack to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, presenting her findings at international conferences and publishing her research. She subsequently received a research fellowship at the Deutsches Museum for her project on synthesizers and film music. At the 2021 annual meeting of the American Musical Instrument Society (AMIS), she received the Frederick R. Selch Award for her paper on the Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer and the soundtrack to Blade Runner.

Since October 2021, she has been a research and teaching associate at the Institute of Musicology at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München, where she completed her doctoral dissertation on music and sound in American television series of the streaming era. The dissertation, which received the Dissertation Prize of the Gesellschaft für Musikforschung (2025), is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan. Her doctoral research also earned a Second Honorable Mention for the Outstanding Dissertation Award of the International Musicological Society (IMS), as well as the Claudia Gorbman Graduate Student Writing Award (winner 2023, runner-up 2024). She received the Tonkunst-Preis 2021 for her essay »Klingende Destruktion in der Zweiten Klaviersonate von Pierre Boulez«.

She takes up the role of co-editor of Music, Sound, and the Moving Image in May 2026 and has been serving on the editorial board of the Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung since October 2022. Her current research projects focus on the soundtracks of Korean television series (K-dramas), streaming interfaces, and the role of synthesizers in film music.