UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE

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Short bio

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

Since the 2010s in particular, the figure of the singer-songwriter seems to be experiencing a 'revival' in the (self-)fashioning of a number of musicians. Indeed, it seems as if the idea of the solo artist with only rudimentary instruments, whose musical performance evokes immediacy, political commitment and emotional involvement precisely through its simplicity, has gained popularity again. This development has certainly been reinforced by the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan in 2016, which contributed to the revival of the singer-songwriter, but also triggered critical voices, which considered this a form of "veiled conservatism" and "painful retrospective recognition" of a "song tradition" that is primarily shaped by white, male songwriters.  Since then, at the very latest, the figure of the singer-songwriter has probably been up for debate like never before: Billboard magazine, for example, immediately after the award ceremony, discussed whether the African-American artist Beyoncé was actually "the next Bob Dylan".  When Kendrick Lamar became the first musician from the hip hop tradition to win the Pulitzer Prize in 2018, he was also portrayed as a lyricist and contemporary diagnostician, as a "storyteller" who captures the "complexity of modern African-American life" through "autobiographically intimate ... vignettes".  The singer-songwriter figure has thus been addressed and employed beyond the white and male-connoted folk rock paradigm, not least in the mode of critical examination of established traditions and the associated marginalization and claims to exclusivity. In the recent past, artists, who at first glance appear to be outside these established patterns, have increasingly been presented as singer-songwriters.

The project explores the questions of how exactly someone (and who in the first place) is represented, addressed as and thus turned into a singer-songwriter. We ask: Who is in charge of and involved in these processes of figuration? What are their media-technological conditions? How are (self-)fashionings as singer-songwriters authenticated (and by whom?) Which (identity-political, marketing-related, aesthetic, ...) functions do these processes of figuration potentially have? Addressing these questions, the project thus aims at contributing a genealogy of the figure of the singer-songwriter. Moreover, on a conceptual-theoretical level, it sets out to provide a more nuanced vocabulary to analyze and describe figuration processes 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