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Anna Grau Schmidt

  • Music & Performing Arts Librarian, UWM Libraries
  • Lecturer, Music
  • Lecturer, School of Information Studies

Education

  • PhD, History of Music, University of Pennsylvania
  • MS, Library and Information Science, University of Illinois
  • BA, Music & History, College of William and Mary

Biography

Dr. Anna Grau Schmidt is a librarian and musicologist. Her central goal at UWM is to help student artists in all fields develop skills to navigate and use information in their practice.

After receiving a BA in music and history and a PhD in the History of Music, Dr. Schmidt taught music history at DePaul University and the University of Illinois-Chicago for over a decade. In 2019, she earned an MS in Library and Information Studies, and she arrived at UWM as Music & Performing Arts Librarian in 2020. In this role, she provides research lessons, consultations, and support for students in music, theatre, dance, and art & design. As a lecturer, she also teaches Music 710: Graduate Studies in Music and INFO ST 627: Music Librarianship.

Dr. Schmidt's research includes interest in both music history and information studies. As a musicologist, her work focuses on medieval French song and motets. In particular, she investigates the relationship between vernacular song and contemporary ideas about gender and identity. Her musicology publications include the co-edited Female Voice Song and Women's Musical Agency in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2022). She has also contributed chapters to essay collections on Adam de la Halle, the Montpellier Codex, and gender and voice in the Middle Ages.

Dr. Schmidt is also a leader in research on teaching information skills to students in the arts. She is chair of the Music Library Association's Instruction Subcommittee, and was part of a team that created guiding documents for librarians teaching research skills in music courses. The team has expanded on their work through articles in Performing Arts Resources, Notes, and recent essay collections. They also delivered a plenary address at the 2024 Music Library Association national conference. A forthcoming co-authored essay in the Oxford Handbook of Public Musicology will explore the ways music librarians work as public musicologists.

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