Dr Audrey Wozniak

Audrey Wozniak is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on the politics of belonging. Her research lies at the intersection of social theory (especially critical, feminist, postcolonial, and the post-Anthropocene) with music and sound studies. She is interested in how sound and space are imbricated in individual and collective negotiations of boundaries—of the self, identities, histories, nations, modernity, etc.—and emerge in the organization of people, work, and lived environments. 

Audrey’s research has examined these issues in contexts ranging from the cultural diplomacy efforts of Turkish diasporic community music groups to the path of the world-famous Zildjian cymbal from seventeenth-century Ottoman military ensembles into European orchestras and American jazz bands. Her ongoing projects include a monograph examining the outsized role of the state in producing the dominant “amateur-professional” dichotomy underpinning the institutions and hierarchies of today’s Turkish music industry as well as a multimedia exhibition centering the cymbal to how material objects mediate the institutions of modernity. 

Much of Audrey’s work is defined by engagement with performance ethnography, artistic research, and public outreach as a musician-scholar working in the creative industries of Türkiye, the UK, Europe, and the United States.

Audrey received her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology with a secondary concentration in Social Anthropology from Harvard University. She is Senior Research Associate at the Orient-Institut Istanbul and has held fellowships from the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Fulbright-Hays DDRA program, Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, and the British Institute at Ankara, among others. She also holds Master’s degrees in Politics and Communication (LSE) and Violin Performance (Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance), and a Bachelor’s in Music and East Asian Studies (Wellesley College). She spent a year learning from traditional musical masters in Indonesia, China, and Türkiye on a 2014-2015 Thomas J. Watson Fellow, and more recently was appointed Artist-in-Residence at Harvard University's I Tatti Center for Renaissance Studies in Italy and Guest Researcher at University of Heidelberg's Collective Research Centre 1671 Heimat(en).

Audrey is an accomplished performer and experienced facilitator of cross-cultural artistic programming. Trained as a Western classical violinist, she has spent nearly a decade learning Turkish classical makam-based music through working with master musicians.