Dr. Nili Belkind Appointed as Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Illinois!

The Center for Ethnomusicology warmly congratulates Dr. Nili Belkind, a 2014 alumna of the Columbia Ethnomusicology PhD Program, who has been awarded a two-year Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities-Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Dr. Belkind's Columbia dissertation is entitled Music in conflict: Palestine, Israel, and the politics of aesthetic production.  It was sponsored (advised) by Prof. Christopher Washburne.   The dissertation is an ethnographic study of the fraught and complicated cultural politics of music making in Israel-Palestine in the context of the post-Oslo era, a time of highly polarized sentiments and general retreat from the expressive modes of relationality that accompanied the 1990s peace process. In it, she examines the politics of sound and the ways in which music making and attached discourses reflect and constitute identities, and also, contextualize political action. Ethical and aesthetic positions that shape contemporary artistic production in Israel-Palestine are informed by profound imbalances of power between the State (Israel), the stateless (Palestinians of the oPt), the complex positioning of Israel’s Palestinian minority, and contingent exposure to ongoing political violence.

Congratulations Nili!