Carolin Müller
(AMMR grantee)
 

 

Carolin Müller is an interdisciplinary scholar and artist whose work combines artistic methods with ethnographic and historical approaches to examine how music and aesthetic forms participate in social transformation. At The Ohio State University, she completed her doctoral thesis From Musical Activism to Musical Citizenship: Dresden’s Banda Internationale, which discusses integrative community brass musicking in the context of anti-immigrant politics in Germany. She is a recipient of the prestigious Martin Buber Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Ohio State Presidential Fellowship, alongside numerous grants in support of her artistic and scholarly work. Her postdoctoral artistic research Body.Motion.Etch, based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explores how sonic and visual residues of bodily encounters can challenge the heteronormativity of language through drawing-based methodologies. In 2024, she led a pilot study in Windhoek, Namibia, to explore the memory and presence of city’s brass music cultures using sound-walking and community-based action research. Alongside her scholarship, Carolin has organized transnational artist residencies and co-curated public formats such as the Migrants Music Manifesto in Cologne.

These experiences have shaped her approach to applied music research, which she understands as a public and participatory practice that links theory, pedagogy, and civic engagement. Across her work, she returns to the question of how communities mobilize sonic, visual, and bodily forms, particularly within brass traditions, to engage histories of migration, inequality, and resistance. By working through artistic processes such as drawing, reorchestration, and sound-walking, she traces how these practices sustain political agency and cultural continuity under shifting social conditions.

Carolin received an AMMR seed money grant from MMRC to develop the research project “Nama-Damara Brass Music, Marginalization, and Cultural Resilience in Namibia.”