Melanie Plesch is a Professor of Musicology at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. She initially studied music and musicology in Argentina, where she obtained degrees in Music Performance, Music Education, and Musicology; she earned her PhD in Historical Musicology from the University of Melbourne in 1998. Her research focuses on the construction of meaning in Argentine art music and its intersections with vernacular musics, literature and the visual arts, through an interdisciplinary musicological practice that combines topic theory, cultural history and ethnohistory. She has published extensively on Argentine art music, including monographs, edited books, book chapters and peer-reviewed scholarly articles. In 2015 she held an International Research Visitorship at the University of Oxford, in the Balzan Programme in Musicology "Towards a Global History of Music" led by Professor Reinhard Strohm. In 2019 she was elected a corresponding fellow of the Argentine National Academy of Arts.