Barbara Titus

Barbara Titus is an Associate Professor of cultural musicology at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of two books: Recognizing Music as an Art Form: Friedrich Th. Vischer and German music criticism, 1848-1887 (Leuven University Press, 2016), and Hearing Maskanda: Musical Epistemologies in South Africa (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). 

Barbara studied musicology at Utrecht University and gained her doctorate from Oxford University in the United Kingdom. After her engagement with the Hegelian philosophical impact on 19th-century German music criticism for her doctorate, she shifted her attention from German metaphysics to South African street music (maskanda) in 2007, with the explicit aim to question the polarity that these two fields of investigation still seem to represent. 

Her articles have been published in journals such as Acta Musicologica, Ethnomusicology, SAMUS: South African Music Studies and the Dutch Journal of Music Theory. Barbara is a fellow at the African Studies Centre Leiden (ASCL) Community. She is co-editor of the journal the world of music (new series), and is a member of the advisory board for the journal Music Theory and Analysis. 

During two extensive field trips for her research into maskanda in 2008 and 2009, she was a visiting professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. In the winter semester 2013-14, she was a guest professor at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany. In the spring of 2016, she was a researcher in residence at the University of Vienna in Austria as a Balzan Visiting Scholar. 

Barbara is the curator of the Jaap Kunst Sound Collection at the University of Amsterdam. In this capacity she is the Project Leader and First Principal Investigator of the JPICH-funded project Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound Archives (DeCoSEAS) that renegotiates established understandings of heritage curation from the Global South.