Clara Wenz is an ethnomusicologist specializing in Middle Eastern music, music and sound studies, political ethnography, anthropology of religion and relationships between Europe and the Middle East. Her current research project chronicles the present and past lives of a Syrian-Jewish musical record which was released by the Lebanese Baidaphon company in the 1920s. It draws on archival research and fieldwork undertaken in Berlin, Beirut, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Cairo.
Fellowships and Grants
Doctoral Studentship Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (German National Academic Foundation), 2016-2019
Mildred Loss Studentship, Jewish Music Institute (JMI), SOAS, 2015-2019
Employment
Senior Teaching Fellow, Music Department, SOAS, London, 2018-2019
Education
PhD in Ethnomusicology, SOAS, London, 2015-present
MA Middle Eastern Studies, SOAS, London, 2012-2013
BA Philosophy (Munich School of Philosophy), 2008-2010
Publications
Wenz, Clara. 2016. “The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa and Performing al-Andalus: Music and Nostalgia across the Mediterranean” (Review), Ethnomusicology Forum 25 (3): 373-377.
Presentations
“Suspicion, Borders and Landscapes Lost to Conflict: My Journey with an Arab-Jewish Baidaphon Record”, Workshop Beginnings and Legacies of Recording Technologies in the Eastern Mediterranean, EUME, Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin 4-5 April 2019.
“Tarab in Crisis, Samples of a New World: The Music of Hello Psychaleppo”, ICTM Study Group for the Music in the Arab World Symposium, Cairo Egypt, 7-10 January 2019.
“Music, Religion and Voice on the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Border” (with Dr. Ilana Webster-Kogen), Consortium for Asian and African Studies (CAAS), 9th Symposium, Paris, France, 19-20 Oct 2018.
“History on Rewind: Traveling with an Arab-Jewish Baidaphon Record”, Middle East and Central Asian Music Forum, London, 10 Nov 2017.
“Dancing Dissonance - Refugees in Concert in Berlin”, Annual Conference of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE), Sheffield, UK, 20-23 April 2017.
“Listening to Arab-Jewish Aleppo: Towards an Architecture of Musical Memory”, International Graduate and Post-Doctoral Summer Workshop, Forum for Contemporary Ethnomusicology and Da’at Hamakom, Yad Hashmonah, Israel, July 10-11 2016.