Dr Rim Irscheid is a postdoctoral researcher and curator working on the intersection of curatorial activism, diaspora music-making, and cultural policy across Lebanon and Germany. 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'. Since 2019, she organises installations, performances and panel discussions for the annual Planet Ears symposium for contemporary global culture in Mannheim, Germany.

Irscheid's doctoral research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council via the London Arts and Humanities Partnership, with additional support from the British Forum for Ethnomusicology. She holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology & Curatorial Practice from King's College London, a Master’s degree in Musicology from the University of Oxford and a joint honours BA in Musicology and Psychology from the University of Heidelberg.

Research interests and PhD supervision

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

Expertise and public engagement

Since 2019, Irscheid curates a public platform for exchanges between diaspora musicians, researchers and creative industry workers at Planet Ears Festival for Contemporary Global Cultures in Mannheim, Germany. She also regularly appears on radio shows and podcasts to speak about the working conditions and discourse around migrantised musicians working in Germany. With a keen interest in cultural policy, she advises institutions and funding juries on 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.