Dr. Kathryn Agnes Huether is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Antisemitism Studies at UCLA’s Initiative to Study Hate and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. Her work examines sound as a political and cultural force, bringing Holocaust and Genocide Studies into conversation with sound studies, media theory, and human rights. She focuses particularly on how sonic practices mediate trauma, violence, and collective memory, and how listening becomes a site where ideologies of hate and solidarity are encoded, contested, and circulated. Extending this work into the digital present, she also researches AI, authenticity, ethics, and voice, asking how algorithmic systems reshape what counts as testimony, presence, and listening.
Her book, Sounding the Holocaust in Film (forthcoming), an educational compendium bridging film music studies and Holocaust studies, and is currently completing Sounding Hate: Sonic Politics in the Age of Platforms and AI, which examines how digital infrastructures and algorithmic amplification normalize contemporary forms of hate. Her work has most recently appeared in Sound Studies, and she has a forthcoming guest-edited series, “Hate and NonHuman Listening,” as well as an upcoming article in the Journal for the Society of American Music. She has also been invited to speak at two of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University’s (HEFNU) Regional Institutes.
She received her Ph.D. in musicology, with a graduate minor in cultural studies, from the University of Minnesota and holds an M.A. in religious studies from the University of Colorado Boulder. She was the 2021–2022 American University and Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Postdoctoral Fellow, and has held visiting appointments at Bowdoin College and Vanderbilt University.
