Lois Rosow started her teaching career at UCLA, then held a post-doctoral fellowship at Cornell University, and served on the faculty of Ohio State from 1985 to 2014. She headed the Musicology area for seventeen years.

Her research is focused mainly on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is an authority on French opera of that period, with particular interest in text-music relations, allegorical meaning, music printing and engraving, performance-practice issues, and the administrative history and scribal workshop of the Paris Opera. She has published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Early Music, the Cambridge Opera Journal, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, and various anthologies, among them Lully Studies (Cambridge, 2000) and New Perspectives on Marc-Antoine Charpentier (Ashgate, 2010). She served as guest editor for a special issue of the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music and is currently Editor-in-Chief of that journal. Her critical edition of Armide by Jean-Baptiste Lully (Olms, 2003), completed with a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, has served for productions released on audio CD (Naxos, 2008) and DVD (FRA musica, 2011). She has served as president of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music and on the Board of Directors of the American Musicological Society.