UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE

Office Hour

By appointment

Courses in Winter 2024/25

BA-Seminar

• New Yorker Geschichten: Stadt/Umwelt in der populären Musik (AS)
  Friday, 12.00 to 13.30 pm, Seminar room 0.012

Advanced seminar

• Rural America: A History of Folk and Country Music in the U.S.   
  Tuesday, 14.00 to 15.30 pm, Seminar room 0.012

Curriculum vitae

Since 08/2021 | Postdoctoral researcher, project: Figurations of the Singer-Songwriter in Digital-Algorithmic Media Cultures 

12/2017 - 07/2021 | Doctoral Studies in North American Studies, Department of History, University of Cologne, "Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People": Alan Lomax, the South, and the American Folk Music Revival, 1933- 1969 (summa cum laude)

10/2018 - 10/2018 | Participant in the Bucerius Young Scholars Forum, GHI West, Berkeley, CA

01/2018 - 08/2018 | Scholar in Residence at the American University, Washington, D.C.

10/2013 - 11/2016 | Master's degree in North American Studies at the University of Cologne, Master's thesis: To Preserve and Popularize: The Politics of Alan Lomax (1.0).

04/2016 - 07/2016 | DAAD scholarship at the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C., USA

Research Project

Figurations of the Singer-Songwriter in Digital-Algorithmic Media Cultures

The project examines processes of updating and diversifying the singer-songwriter figure in the
context of the so-called digital transformation. It starts from the observation that, although the singer-songwriter figure has been omnipresent in the global pop music scene for about half a century, it has significantly gained in media presence since the 2010s: Musicians such as Ed  Sheeran and Taylor Swift use the figure as a point of reference in processes of self-fashioning; yet the figure is also, and increasingly so, referred to in the aesthetic and/or ideological positioning of artists beyond the folk rock/pop paradigm (in hip hop, for example). This updating and diversifying ‘revival’ of the singer-songwriter figure, as the project assumes, is particularly due to the proliferation of digital-algorithmic media technologies in the production, distribution and reception of popular music, as their promises of participation as well as closeness and intimacy resonate with the promise of authenticity traditionally associated with the singer-songwriter figure.

The project scrutinizes this thesis by analyzing the discursive and non-discursive practices of
producing the singer-songwriter figure in selected media constellations – from crowd-based patronage structures (e.g. Patreon) to ‘digital campfires’ (e.g. on TikTok) as places of virtual community building to debates on AI-driven songwriting (e.g. in the case of the ‘last’ song by The Beatles). By focusing on these processes of figuration, it sheds light on how exactly someone – and who in the first place – is fabricated as a singer-songwriter, by whom and under what conditions; it asks how the singer-songwriter takes, or is given, a specific shape in different medial environments, how they are authenticated and evaluated as such, and which potential (identity-political, marketing, aesthetic, etc.) effects and functions this may have. The project thus unravels how the singer-songwriter figure is re-evaluated, repositioned and appropriated through media-technological transformations in conjunction with social changes and developments. In doing so, it not only contributes to a genealogy of the singer-songwriter figure and thus complements the existing research discourse, which has largely been focusing on historical case studies and questions of genre, but – on a conceptual-theoretical level – also contributes to a more nuanced analysis and description of processes of figuration in digital-algorithmic media cultures.

Publications

Alan Lomax, The South, and the American Folk Music Revival. Peter Lang, Berlin, 2022.

Rezension: Michael Borshuk (Hrsg.). Jazz in American Culture, Cambridge (2022). In: HSoz-Kult, (erscheint voraussichtlich im März, 2024).

Female Blues and the Public Sphere, American Matters, Feb. 9, 2023, https://namcologne.wordpress.com/2023/02/09/female-blues-and-the-public-sphere/.

Women Sound Artists and the Public Space: Sylvia Robinson, Grapefruits, Ausgabe 7, May 2023.

The South and the Making of the American Other: Folk Music, Internal Migration, and the Cultural Left, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Supplement 15 (2020), 63-93.

Mediators of Knowledge: WPA Folklorists and 1930s Migrant Culture, History of Knowledge, April 11, 2018, https://historyofknowledge.net/2018/04/11/mediators-of-knowledge-wpa-folklorists-and-1930s-migrant-culture/.

Rezension: Rachel Farebrother (Hrsg.), A History of the Harlem Renaissance, Cambridge (2021), In: HSoz-Kult, Nov. 17, 2021, https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-97785.

Research Interests

• Popular Historical Consciousness

• Social and Cultural History of the United States

• History of Knowledge

• History of Music