Kathryn Agnes Huether, PhD
**While I was honored to be featured on Tablet Magazine's Unorthodox podcast as the 'Gentile of the Week,' it was not without reservations. Identities are complex, and nothing is ever a simple 'either/or.' To truly understand someone as an individual and their reasoning, it’s important to avoid assumptions and not read too much into labels.assessing the world through sonic interactions
Kathryn Agnes Huether received her PhD in Ethnomusicology/Musicology from the University of Minnesota in 2021. She is currently UCLA’s Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and the Initiative to Study Hate’s joint postdoctoral researcher in the study of antisemitism. Previously, she was at Vanderbilt University, Bowdoin College, and was the 2021-2022 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research and American University’s Postdoctoral Fellow.
Her primary areas of research consider how music—or more broadly sound—mediates modes of contemporary understanding regarding history, memory, discrimination, and trauma with particular emphasis on Holocaust Memory and African American Slavery. 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, musical, and vocal practices employed within Holocaust museums, film, and 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 late 18th-20th centuries and examines the work of composers Felix Bartholdy-Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Hanns Eisler, and Leonard Bernstein, to name a few.