Editor in chief: Prof Dr Birgit Abels, Department of Musicology, Georg-August-University Göttingen (GER)
Birgit Abels is professor of cultural musicology at Georg-August-University Göttingen (Germany). Her personal research interests include neo-phenomenological and Pacific Indigenous approaches to the performing arts as well as music-making as an epistemological practice. The geographic foci of her research are the Pacific Ocean (particularly Micronesia), North India, and the Southeast Asian Island world. Her books include Sounds of Articulating Identity. Tradition and Transition in the Music of Palau, Micronesia (2008), which was recognized with the ICAS Book Prize (PhD) 2009, The Harmonium in North Indian Music (2010), and Music Worlding in Palau. Chanting, Atmospheres, and Meaningfulness (2022). She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator project Sound Knowledge. Alternative Epistemologies of Music in the Western Pacific Island World and full member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony.
Co-editor: Dr Barbara Titus, University of Amsterdam (NL)
Barbara Titus is an Associate Professor of cultural musicology at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of two books Recognizing Music as an Art Form: Friedrich Th. Vischer and German music criticism, 1848-1887 (Leuven University Press, 2016), and Hearing Maskanda: Musical Epistemologies in South Africa (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).
Barbara studied musicology at Utrecht University and gained her doctorate from Oxford University in the United Kingdom. Her articles have been published in journals such as Acta Musicologica, Ethnomusicology, SAMUS: South African Music Studies and the Dutch Journal of Music Theory. Barbara is the curator of the Jaap Kunst Sound Collection at the University of Amsterdam. In this capacity she is the Project Leader and First Principal Investigator of the JPICH-funded project Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives (DeCoSEAS) that renegotiates established understandings of heritage curation.