Research

Dr Rim Irscheid is a postdoctoral fellow at the Music Department of King's College London working across the fields of ethnomusicology, curatorial theory, urban anthropology, and cultural policy research.

Since 2019, she has worked as a freelance curator for sound interventions and public discussions on anti-racist approaches to diaspora music at the Mannheim-based festival Planet Ears. Research on the festival and her curatorial involvement forms part of her monograph (in preparation) on institutional diversity policies and grassroots interventions in the field of free improvised and experimental music from the SWANA region.
 
Combining research and practice-led and art-based approaches to knowledge production, her recent installation work (Glasgow 2024) considers the paradox of German 'Leitkultur' and ambivalent feelings of alienation, belonging, and lived experiences of German citizens of Palestinian heritage in the Federal Republic. Combining textual elements (felt, leather, chalk, steel) and field recordings, her work portrays "Palestinianness" as an identity category delicately nestled within the private sphere in the current dynamic social and political landscape in Germany.

In 2024, she joined the Music Department at King's College London as a Postdoctoral Fellow on the ERC/UKRI-funded project 'Beyond 1932: Rethinking Musical Modernity in the Middle East and North Africa'. The project is looking at the sonic legacies, future visions, and colonial history of music pedagogy and archiving in the Levante and Egypt. As part of the Beyond 1932 research project, she curates an Artist Residency Series in collaboration with the British Library, inviting artists from Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and beyond to reflect on the sonic and colonial legacy of the 1932 Cairo Congress.  

Her recordings and research materials of the residency programme will be stored as the 'Beyond 1932 Collection' at the British Library Sound Archive.