Kathryn Huether will join the Blair faculty as a visiting assistant professor of musicology in fall 2023. She is a classically trained violinist who received her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Minnesota in 2021, followed by a year as a postdoctoral fellow. She just completed a term as a visiting professor of music at Bowdoin College.
Huether’s primary areas of research consider how music—or more broadly sound—mediates modes of contemporary understandings regarding history, memory, discrimination, and trauma. Her book project, Sounding Trauma, Mediating Memory: Holocaust Economy and the Politics of Sound, examines sound usage within contemporary Holocaust memory and argues that the sonic practices employed within Holocaust museums, film, and even testimony can be read as a simulacrum of the Holocaust’s ‘political economy.’
Secondary areas of interest stem from a fusion of her approach to musicology and her background in religious studies/Jewish studies, and are concerned with German/Jewish identity politics and European art music (symphony, opera, lieder) from the the late 18th-20th centuries and examines the work of composers Felix Bartholdy-Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Leonard Bernstein, to name a few.
Website: http://kathrynhuether.com