Rim Irscheid

Dr Rim Irscheid is a postdoctoral researcher and curator working on the intersection of curatorial activism, diaspora music-making, and cultural policy across Lebanon and Germany. She is currently a Research Associate on the UKRI project 'Beyond 1932: Rethinking Musical Modernity in the Middle East and North Africa' under the lead of Professor Martin Stokes.

Her doctoral research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council via the London Arts and Humanities Partnership, with additional support from the British Forum for Ethnomusicology. She holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology & Curatorial Practice from King's College London, a Master’s degree in Musicology from the University of Oxford and a joint honours BA in Musicology and Psychology from the University of Heidelberg.

Contact: [email protected]

Irscheid completed her PhD at the Music Department at King's College London with a project exploring the intersection of experimental sound production, curatorial activism and cultural policy in Lebanon and Germany. Combining ethnographic research, policy-in-practice, and curatorial theory, her PhD looked at the social and cultural implications of musical collaborations across Beirut, Berlin, and Mannheim.

The project aimed to find out how artists in emerging cross-border networks produce, showcase, and experience experimental sound and image in places that facilitate and amplify affective encounters between artists and curators with shared beliefs and value systems marked by antagonism against narrational strategies of 'world music' productions at European festival sites.

Focusing specifically on representations of difference, movement, and uncertainty in collaborative music projects, this project aimed to shed light on the significant role of mediated audience engagement and the sonic reclaiming of physical and digital spaces as a pedagogical tool to contest 'world music' narratives. This included the textual analysis of images and video material used in the marketing of these projects with regard to cultural representations of Arab musicianship in German media texts.