Rutger Helmers is an Assistant Professor of Musicology, specialized in nineteenth-century music history, with a focus on national identity, opera, and the Russian Empire. He teaches a variety of courses in historical musicology at the University of Amsterdam and his current research focuses on the representation of Ukraine in the musical life of the Russian Empire. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2012 at Utrecht University under the supervision of Emile Wennekes and Marina Frolova-Walker (University of Cambridge), and, in addition to his position at the University of Amsterdam, has taught at the Musicology programme at Utrecht University and at Literary and Cultural Studies at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. He has been an editor for the interdisciplinary journal De Moderne Tijd (Modern Times: The Low Countries, 1780–1940) between 2015 and 2022, served as member the board of the KVNM (Royal Society for Music History of The Netherlands) from 2016 to 2019, and was a HURI Research Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University in 2022. His work has led to various publications, including the monograph Not Russian Enough? Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera (University of Rochester Press, 2014) and contributions to Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Čajkovskij-Studien, The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism, The Oxford Handbook to the Operatic Canon, and Music & Letters.