Ethnomusicology PhD Candidate Nili Belkind Wins Whiting Fellowship!

The Department of Music congratulates Ethnomusicology PhD candidate Nili Belkind, who has been awarded a prestigious Whiting Fellowship by Columbia's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  The fellowship is provided by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation to enable the completion of innovative and excellent doctoral dissertations. 

Ms. Belkind's dissertation research is an inquiry into the relationship between musical culture and political life in Israel/Palestine, where for the past century, violent conflict has been both shaping and claiming the lives of Palestinians and Jews. She focuses on the complex ways in which musical culture acts as a sphere in which power and hegemony are asserted, negotiated and resisted between and within different groups, in relation to the political situation. She analyzes the politics of sound as a sphere that is both reflective of the situation and constitutive of identity formations, particularly in relationship to conceptualizations of citizenship, nationality, ethnicity, and ‘home.’

Themes highlighted in her dissertation include: the role of cultural policy in the production of social imaginaries in Palestine and Israel through musical activity; the relationship between identity, music making, spatiality, and temporality in Palestine, where movement is highly constricted by the occupation; the musical activity that surrounded the summer 2011 social protest movement in Israel, during which attempts were made to disrupt the hegemony of class and ethno-national hierarchies, and the musical production of individual Palestinian artists who are citizens of Israel and who, due to their minoritized status and the political situation, must negotiate between multiple and contradictory spheres of belonging.
 

Congratulations Nili!