Research seminar in Musicology and Intermedia studies: K-Pop as Cosmopolitan Youth Culture in Germany

Professor Michael Fuhr, University of Hildesheim.

This presentation emerges from a collaborative research project on the audience reception and fan culture of K-Pop in Europe. He will present and discuss central aspects and findings of his case study, which focuses on K-Pop fans in Germany. Based on ethnographic methods such as participant observation and in-depth interviews, he will discuss some of the positions, practices, individual and social motivations and functions of K-Pop fans and intermediaries in Germany. Prime attention will be given to the participatory dimension of K-Pop cover dances and fandom as driven by a cosmopolitan youth culture. 

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Biography

Michael Fuhr is director of the Center for World Music at University of Hildesheim and interim professor of Ethnomusicology at Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media. He received his PhD degree from University of Heidelberg with a thesis on globalisation processes of popular music in South Korea. He worked as lecturer and research assistant at the Berlin Phonogram-Archive and at universities in Berlin (Humboldt), Cologne, Frankfurt am Main, Göttingen, and Hanover. In 2009 and 2010 he was a visiting fellow at the Institute of East Asian Studies at Sungkonghoe University, Seoul. His research interests relate to questions of identity, migration and globalisation of music, to cultural theory, aesthetics, traditional and popular music of Korea, sound archives and collections, as well as to theories, methods, and histories of ethnomusicology. He recently finished a cooperative research project on the K-Pop reception and fandom in Europe. His publications include Popular Music and Aesthetics. The Historic-philosophical Reconstruction of Disdain, Bielefeld: transcript (2007) [in German], Globalization and Popular Music in South Korea: Sounding Out K-Pop. New York/London: Routledge (2015), and “K-Pop Music and Transnationalism”, in: Youna Kim (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society, London/ New York: Routledge (2017), ‘Diggin‘ Up Music‘: Ethnomusicology as Building Site/Musikethnologie als Baustelle. Festschrift für Raimund Vogels zum 65. Geburtstag (co-edited with K. Klenke and J. Mendívil), Hildesheim: Olms (2021), and Music, Remembering and Cultural Memory (co-edited with C. Gruber), Hildesheim University Press (forthc.).