Elaine Kelly studied at Maynooth University (BA Music) and at Queen’s University Belfast (MA in Twentieth-Century Music, PhD). She has written extensively on intersections between music, culture, and politics in the German Democratic Republic and post-Wende East Germany, and is currently working on a research project, funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, which will culminate in a book titled Music and Anti-Imperialist Solidarities: East Germany and the Third World. Her publications include Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford University Press, 2014), Art Outside the Lines: New Perspectives on GDR Art Culture (Rodopi, 2011; edited with Amy Wlodarski), and Confronting the National in the Musical Past (Routledge, 2018; edited with Derek B. Scott and Markus Mantere), as well as articles in venues such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Opera Quarterly, Kritika, Nineteenth-Century Music, Twentieth-Century Music, and Music & Letters.

Elaine served five-year terms as co-editor of the Journal of Musicology and as a vice president of the Royal Musical Association (both 2019–23), and was head of the Reid School of Music from 2017–2020. She is a member of the AHRC Peer Review Council, and has served as a panel member for various international funding bodies including the ERC.