GOING VIRAL’s team consists of currently five researchers, a project management assistant and an international advisory board of colleagues from different disciplines:
Principal Investigator
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild
As a cultural historian of music, I am particularly interested in the connection between music and emotions – how it has been conceptualized, discussed, practiced and experienced, and how to study it from a historical perspective. I am fascinated by the theoretical and methodological challenges that this subject entails and use a multidisciplinary bundle of methods – from Cultural Studies and Anthropology to Praxeology and Phenomenology – to find new ways of approaching it. Historically, I focus on Greek Antiquity and the 18th to 21st centuries and add sources from the histories of medicine, aesthetics, philosophy, religion, law, the body and the senses to music(ologic)al ones. I have published extensively on the theory, methodology and history of music, emotions and medicine, on music cultures of the 20th/21st centuries, on epistemologies of music and on musicology in interdisciplinary contexts.
I studied music, musicology, philosophy and law in Detmold, Heidelberg and Yale and hold a PhD from FU Berlin (2013). Postdoctoral positions led me, among others, to the research centres for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin and Queen Mary University London, to ZiF (Bielefeld), CRASSH (Cambridge) and the Cambridge Music Faculty. In 2020/21, I was Assistant Professorship at Utrecht University, before having been appointed University Professor of Musicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw). I am an elected member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Science.
A full CV and list of publications, talks and organised conferences can be found here.
Postdoctoral Researchers
Dr. Mark Seow (since January 2024)
I am a British violinist and musicologist. In 2023, I held the position of AHRC DTP1 Fellow at the Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge. I received my doctorate in the sacred cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach from King’s College, Cambridge, where I was supervised by Professor Bettina Varwig and funded by the AHRC DTP and the Isaac Newton Trust. My research focuses on embodiment, musical hermeneutics and metaphor in 18th-century Germany. At its heart, my work explores how we think about and feel what music is through language and our bodies.
Alongside academia, I am a broadcaster for BBC Radio 3 and a critic for Gramophone. I present the weekly segment ‘The Early Music News’ as part of The Early Music Show. I also created ‘Eastern Classical’, a documentary about East Asian experience in Western classical music for BBC Radio 4. I am a professional orchestral violinist, performing with leading international ensembles including The English Concert, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Orkester Nord, Dunedin Consort, La Serenissima, and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
Dr. Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi (FRHistS) (starting October 2024)
I am an architectural historian of health/medicine and emotions. An avid advocate of the history of emotions as a way of doing history, my research explores topics such as internationalism, hospital design and imperialism. Before joining the GOING VIRAL Team, I was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Previously, I also held postdoctoral and visiting research positions at Tampere University, University College Dublin and the University of Edinburgh (funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art). I was awarded my PhD from University College Dublin in 2018, where I was an Irish Research Council (IRC) doctoral scholar. My first monograph, Emotion, Mission, Architecture was published with Edinburgh University Press in 2022 (paperback 2024). I am currently co-authoring a monograph for Cambridge Elements on Histories of Emotions and the Senses entitled, Feeling Modern European Imperial Architecture and co-editing (with Yasmina El Chami) a Special Issue of Architectural Theory Review and (with Maziyar Ghiabi) a Special Section of Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Associate Fellow of Johanna Quandt Young Academy at Goethe and a member of the Cost Action CA22159 – National, International and Transnational Histories of Healthcare, 1850-2000 (EuroHealthHist). As a member of the GOING VIRAL team, I am working on methodological renovations to explore embodiment and emotions, while embarking on a new project tentatively entitled, “Idrāk: A History of an Experience in Transition.”
PhD Students
Emma Cäcilia Schrott, BA MSt (since March 2024)
I have studied musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Vienna, Sorbonne Université and the University of Oxford, where I graduated with distinction in 2023 as a St Hugh’s College scholarship recipient. My research has focused on the multifaceted roles that music plays in the emotional and embodied responses of people during times of crises, from exploring sonic affects on TikTok aimed at political mobilization during COVID-19, to investigating socio-cultural dynamics of communal electronic dance music practices within a resistance movement in wartime Ukraine. Additionally, I have worked in research at the New York-based Leo Baeck Institute, conducting oral history interviews and navigating historical narratives surrounding Austrian-Jewish emigration to North America. As a PhD student at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna under the supervision of Professor Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild, my doctoral thesis provisionally titled „Emotional Echoes: Music and Emotions During the Spanish Flu Pandemic in Vienna (1918-1919)“ delves into sound and music related dimensions of emotional practices and the transformation of musicking throughout the trajectory of the Spanish Influenza in Vienna.
Aria Esmaeili Torkanbouri, BA MA (since April 2024)
I am a composer, music theorist and ethnomusicologist originally from the city of Tabriz. Between 2007 and 2020, I studied composition, music theory, orchestra conducting and piano in Graz, Berlin, Baku, Istanbul and Tehran. Since 2018, my academic focus has shifted to the more academic aspects of music, resulting in a Master of Ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (MDW) in 2020. In my master’s thesis, I explored the complex interplay of socio-political and music theoretical reasons for the decline of Azerbaijan-Turkish Ashiq art in the last century and developed a new perspective on the tone system of Ashiq music as Azerbaijan-Turkish folk music. Alongside my academic activities, I have continued to work in the field of music as a composer, conductor, performer, jury member at competitions, organiser and manager. My music compositions have won prestigious competitions, including the Alea III (2016) and the Uzeyir Hajibeyli international composition competitions in USA (2021) and have been performed at renowned venues such as the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (2023) and the Leicht Über Linz Festival (2019). Also, I am the artistic director of the Öst Ensemble in Vienna. As part of the GOING VIRAL research team, I am currently working on a PhD thesis with the topic ‘Harmonies of Resilience: Emotional Dimensions of Azerbaijani Music during the Spanish Flu Pandemic’.
Project Management
Johannes Fiebich
Expert Advisory Board
Prof Dr Thiemo Breyer, Professor for Phenomenology and Anthropology, Department of Philosophy, University of Cologne (Germany)
Prof Dr Remi Chiu, Professor and Chair of Musicology, Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University Baltimore (US)
Prof Dr Thomas Dixon, Professor of History, Queen Mary University London (UK)
Prof Dr Bettina Hitzer, Professor of History of Medicine, University of Madgeburg (Germany)
Prof Dr Bettina Varwig, Professor in Music History, Music Faculty, University of Cambridge (UK)
Prof Dr Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, Director of the Department of Music, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt a.M. (Germany)