Dr Rim Irscheid is a postdoctoral researcher and cultural organiser working on the intersection of curatorial activism, cultural policy and sonic arts from Lebanon, Palestine and diaspora communities in Germany and the UK. She is currently a Research Associate in the field of curation on the UKRI project 'Beyond 1932: Rethinking Musical Modernity in the Middle East and North Africa'. As part of the project, she organises the project’s artist residency programme with practitioners from Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Iraqi-Kurdistan to reflect on contemporary sound art and experimental music that emerged as either counter archival practices or artistic responses to the 1932 Cairo Congress of Arabic Music.

Since 2019, she organises installations, performances, art exhibitions, craft-based workshops, and panel discussions for the annual Planet Ears symposium for contemporary global culture in Mannheim, Germany. She completed an AHRC-funded PhD in Ethnomusicology & Curatorial Practice at King's College London (2020-2023) and holds a Master’s degree in Musicology from the University of Oxford (2018), and a joint honours BA in Musicology and Psychology from the University of Heidelberg (2017).

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Free Improvised Music
• Art and Activism
• Artist-led Curation
• Sound Studies
• Diaspora and Migration
• Critical Theory

Teaching

Irscheid teaches sound studies, critical theory, curatorial studies, and ethnomusicology in the Department of Music and the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities at King's College London. She previously taught at the University of Oxford, Columbia University, and the University of Mannheim. She will hold a guest lecture and seminar on contemporary textile art and mixed media installation art from Palestine at Central Saint Martins (UAL) in 2025.

Expertise and public engagement

Since 2019, Irscheid co-organises civic initiatives, workshop formats and residency programmes for diaspora musicians, researchers and creative industry workers in Germany and the UK. She also regularly engages with press, policy and cultural workers in Germany and Switzerland to speak about the working conditions and discourse around migrantised musicians working in Germany. As part of the Beyond 1932 project, Irscheid works with artists from across London and the SWANA region to encourage knowledge exchange initiatives and skills sharing in the fields of sound art and archival practices.

With a keen interest in cultural policy, she advises institutions and funding juries on anti-Arab racism and diversity-sensitive principles of curation that bring greater visibility to experimental sound and image outside orientalist narratives surrounding Arab musicians.

Selected publications

• 2024. ‘The aftermath of German world music: Affective dimensions of collaborative cultural productions across Berlin and Beirut’, in: Yearbook Song and Popular Culture, Center for Popular Culture and Music, Waxmann: Münster.
• [Forthcoming] 2024. ‘Power, agency, curation: Reframing experimental sound production in Berlin’, in: Music and Intercultural Practice, Routledge: London.
• 2023. Curating at Planet Ears, in: ‘On Unperforming the Curatorial’, in: Politics of Curatorship: Collective and Affective Interventions, Norient Books: Bern, p. 63.
• 2023. ‘​​Radio AlHara: Towards a More Sustainable Curatorial Practice’, in: field notes: magazine for contemporary music in Berlin.
• 2023. ‘Curating Narratives, Sensing Their Meaning: How Tuning Into Our Environment Inspires Meaningful Art’, in: Sonic Matter.
• 2021. ‘Radical unintentionality’, in: Norient: the now in sound.
• 2020. ‘BLM & Musikwissenschaft: Antirassismus Transdisziplinär’, in: musiconn.kontrovers.