News
New Faculty Fellow Announced
The Faculty of Music is delighted to announce the appointment of Anna Stirr, currently of Columbia University, New York, as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethnomusicology from October 2009. The appointment will be held in conjunction with St John's College.
Anna is an ethnomusicologist specialising in music and gender, migration, and ethnic and national identity, with a geographic emphasis on South and East Asia, particularly Nepal and Tibet. Her doctoral dissertation, 'Exchanges of Song: Migration, Gender, and Nation in Nepali Dohori Performance', examines how musical circulation and exchange link gendered forms of intimacy with changing conceptions of the nation, focusing on improvised duels of sung poetry known as dohori. Her dissertation research in Nepal focused on dohori's growth as a commercial genre in relation to internal migration during the Maoist conflict. While at Oxford, she plans to shift focus to dohori's role among Nepali migrants outside Nepal, focusing on (topically!) Gurkhas in the UK, and labourers in the countries of the Persian Gulf.
Some of Anna's other research interests include music and language, media and circulation, performance theory, music and religion, and the role of music and sound in social movements.
Anna has published articles in the journals World Literature Today and Himalaya; in the volume Tibetan Modernities; and in the proceedings of the 2006 SASON Anthropology Conference in Kathmandu. An article on Tibetan comedy in the proceedings of the 11th IATS Seminar is forthcoming. She has contributed recordings and research to the Kathmandu-based Spiny Babbler Museum's online museum of traditional music and art.
Anna plays concert and bansuri flute and sings as well. Some of her Nepali dohori performances are available on YouTube: click here to watch Anna singing Sirful Kapal Ma and another dohori song.