Samantha Owens

Samantha Kim Owens is a New Zealand oboe player, musicologist and music historian. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and was awarded the Lilburn Research Fellowship for 2025.

Academic career

Owens completed a PhD on the Württemberg court chapel and it musicians, at Victoria University of Wellington. In 2001, Owens joined the faculty of the School of Music at the University of Queensland, where she worked until 2015, at which point she moved to the New Zealand School of Music at Victoria University of Wellington. Owens became a freelance musicologist in 2024. Owens has twice held a Von Humboldt Fellowships, and has been a visiting fellow at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, the Bach Archive in Leipzig, the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbuettel, and at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.

In 2012, Owens was awarded the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers medal, for the index of the Boydell Press 2011 book Music at German Courts: Changing Artistic Priorities.

Selected works

The Well-Travelled Musician: John Sigismond Cousser and Musical Exchange in Baroque Europe (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2017) Johann Sigismund Kusser, Serenatas for Dublin (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2020) J. S. Bach in Australia: Studies in Reception and Performance with Denis Collins and Kerry Murphy (Melbourne: Lyrebird Press, 2018) Searches for Tradition: Essays on New Zealand Music, Past & Present, with Michael Brown (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2017) Music at German Courts, 1715–1760: Changing Artistic Priorities, with Barbara M. Reul and Janice B. Stockigt (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2011; paperback, 2015) Johann Sigismund Kusser, Adonis (Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, 2009)