Isabella van Elferen is Professor of Music and Director of Research of the School of Performing and Screen Studies. She publishes on film and TV music, video game music, music philosophy, Gothic theory and subcultures, and baroque sacred music. She is the author of Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny (2012), Mystical Love in the German Baroque: Theology – Poetry – Music (2009), and the editor of Nostalgia or Perversion? Gothic Rewriting from the Eighteenth Century until the Present Day (2007). She is currently working on a new book, Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture (forthcoming: Routledge 2015), with Dr Jeffrey Weinstock of Central Michigan University. Her book Gothic Music won the Alan Lloyd Smith prize for best book in Gothic Criticism 2011-2013.

Isabella is Division Head of Visual and Performance Arts and Audiences for the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts. She is editor for The Soundtrack, member of the advisory board of Horror Studies and Aeternum. With Dr Jen Gunnels she was guest editor of The Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts (2013). She is a member of the AHRC funded network Music-based Games, Creativity and Music Education and member of the Advisory Panel of the EC-funded project Europeana Sound led by the British Library.