Anna Schwenck is a postdoctoral researcher at the Sociology Department of Freie Universität Berlin’s Institute for East European Studies and a habilitation candidate at the University of Siegen’s Department of Social Sciences.
She was lead researcher of the project “African Musics and Politics: Negotiations of Violence in South African Popular Music” that formed part of the collaborative research centre Transformations of the Popular, a long-term university-based research institution funded by the German Research Foundation. As scientific coordinator she designed the comparative research design for the interdisciplinary project “Popular Music and the Rise of Populism in Europe” and headed the empirical study of retraditionalization processes in German-language popular music cultures. This research was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, Germany’s largest private, non-profit funding organization for academic research. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology and M.A. in Social Sciences from Humboldt University Berlin. She earned a B.A. in Cultural Studies from Viadrina European University, Frankfurt (Oder).
She was a visiting student/scholar at several institutions, including University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, the Sociology Department at the University of California (Berkeley), the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow) and the Anthropology Department of the University of the Western Cape (Cape Town).
