Margarethe Adams

Visiting Assistant Professor, Ethnomusicology
maggie3adams@yahoo.com

Margarethe Adams specializes in expressive culture and ideology in the post-Soviet world, specifically, the music of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and northwest China, where she conducted ethnographic doctoral research with the support of Fulbright-Hays and Social Science Research Council fellowships. She has taught classes on the music of the Silk Road, and of China’s borderlands, which examined intersections of music with political ideology, cosmology, and religion.

Her current projects examine: Muslim pilgrimage and musician shrines; Kazakhstani music videos; and the musical and cinematic representation of World War II in Kazakhstan.

Margarethe Adams is a recipient of Fulbright-Hays and Social Science Research Council fellowships for her ethnographic doctoral research, and a SSRC Eurasia Program fellowship for dissertation write-up.

Maggie’s teaching interests, like her research, include the articulation of ideology and cosmology with popular culture, an approach that she incorporated into her seminar,  “Current Perspectives on Central Asia,” which she taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007. Her performance specializations include the Kazakh qobyz, Russian village music, and old tyme banjo.

Her next project, a study of music and Islam in Central and Inner Asia, will expand upon her research on Muslim pilgrimage and religious healing, and will particularly address the importance of musician shrines in the region and the use of music and chant in healing.

Education
B.A. (Russian and Soviet Area Studies), Middlebury College;
M.M. and Ph.D. (Musicology) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign