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Dr Meredith Nicoll
Fellow at the SIM from May to August 2026
Dr Meredith Nicoll is a musicologist, performer and cultural mediator. She studied singing, German language and literature, and musicology in the USA and Germany, and was awarded her PhD in 2025 from the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre with a thesis on song production and performance practice in the early GDR. In her research, she combines cultural-historical and performance-related perspectives with an examination of power structures, the formation of musical canons, and institutional practices in the field of music.
Her research project at the State Institute for Music Research focuses on the musical programming of the Palace of the Republic (1976–1990) as a cultural-political practice. The focus is on the systematic analysis of archive holdings at the Federal Archives in Berlin-Lichterfelde, with the aim of reconstructing, for the first time, the institutional decision-making structures and curatorial guidelines of programme planning on the basis of primary sources, and of examining musical events as instruments of socialist cultural policy in the context of the Cold War.