Alumna Dr. Gwendolen von Einsiedel announced as new Dr. Tommy Comeaux Endowed Chair in Traditional Music

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette has announced the naming of Dr. Gwendolen von Einsiedel (St Catherine's College 2017) as the Dr. Tommy Comeaux Endowed Chair in Traditional Music. 

The mission of the Dr. Tommy Comeaux Endowed Chair in Traditional Music is to stimulate interdisciplinary research on the foundations and diversity of traditional music worldwide and to advance the preservation, instruction, and performance of traditional music with an emphasis on traditions that have developed in Acadiana.

Dr. von Einsiedel strives to connect different disciplines and communities through music performance, education, and research. Dr. von Einsiedel holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Music at Oxford. Her doctoral research focused on contemporary zydeco music and Southwest Louisiana's trail ride scene earning her an Arts and Humanities Research Council Award. She earned her Masters in Contemporary and Classical Text from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and a Masters of Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh. As an ethnomusicologist her research interests include race, gender, resistance, and non-human entanglements.

She received a Mellon Humanities grant from Oxford for her podcast series Singing Windrush: Calypso in Britain. Her most recent project, Interrupting the Earth, is a short film made in collaboration with her doctoral research participants.  She received a Global South Fellowship from the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University for the film and a Knowledge Exchange grant from Oxford. 

Dr. von Einsiedel is dedicated to knowledge-sharing and interdisciplinary research outputs and has presented her work nationally and internationally. In addition to written publications, she has produced several short films on vernacular folkways for the BBC, including Brazil's Singing Gauchos, Wassail Tales: The Tradition of the Apple Tree, and Louisiana's Creole Cowboys. She also hosted The Nest Collective Hour, a roots music radio show on London's Resonance FM, for five years.

For more information, please visit the University of Louisiana at Lafayette website.