My doctoral project examines the epistemic, technological, and infrastructural entanglements of sound recording practices in colonial contexts. Focusing on the history of experimental phonetics between the Hamburg Colonial Institute (from 1910) and northern Namibia, the research explores how phonetic inscription technologies – from kymographs to magnetic tape – shaped classification and the emergence of practices of standardization. A current key case study is the 1953 Buttersong recording, which I conceptualise as a sonic agent: a dynamic, contested site of knowledge, voice, mediation, and resistance. Combining media theory, sound studies, and historical epistemology, my work interrogates how infrastructures of listening and recording established hierarchies between scientific rationality and situated, embodied knowledge up tuntil today – and how these boundaries could also be blurred.

• Primary supervisor: Prof. Dr. Ute Holl (University of Basel)
• Co-supervisor: PD Dr. Lorena Rizzo (University of Basel)

Born and raised in Leipzig, I am currently a PhD candidate at the University of Basel, affiliated with the SNF-funded research project The (In)Audible Past. Trained as an archiver, I studied History, Media Studies, and Slavic Studies in Basel and at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. My academic and curatorial work focuses on the intersections of colonial epistemologies, sonic media, and archival practices. Alongside my scholarly research, I have (co-) directed and co-curated collaborative performative and exhibition projects exploring photography, body and sound politics in and beyond colonial archives, including Y/Our Colonial Gaze, Zombiification, and The Body’s The Archive. My doctoral research builds on these experiences by critically engaging with recorded voices, local knowledge production, and sonic infrastructures as epistemic feedback loops between “the East,” “the West,” and Southern Africa.

• Experimental phonetics and colonial linguistics
• Sound archives, tape-recorded practices, and media infrastructures
• Epistemic labour and archival knowledge production
• Post-/decolonial critique and hierarchies of knowledge
• Feedback loops between knowledge, media, and sonic practice

• “Körper und Archiv. Zur Kollektivität, Konnektivität und Performance bei collectif amifusion”, in: FemInfo (2022)
• “Die Reue von Tengiz Abuladze”, in: Klassiker des russischen und sowjetischen Films (2020)
• “20 Jahre Bologna – Studieren unter dem Bologna-System”, in: vpod Bildungspolitik (2019)

Available on request.

• Basel Graduate School of History
• German Society for Media Studies (GfM)