Visiting Faculty
Dr. Nicolette van den Bogerd (she/her) is a musicologist and cultural historian who specializes in the music and cultural history of Polish Jews. She earned a Ph.D. in musicology from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music for her dissertation entitled “Writing Music After the Holocaust: Survivor Identity and Memory in the Works of Polish Jewish Composers.” Her current book project, which builds on her doctoral research, addresses the transnational challenges of Holocaust memory and postwar Jewish identity as expressed in music. She analyzes how a group of Polish-Jewish émigré composers who survived the Holocaust used music composition to engage with the war and public memory culture in Europe from the early postwar period through the 1960s. Employing archival sources from Poland, France, and the United States and drawing on a set of methodologies from Jewish, Holocaust, memory, literary studies, and musicology, she examines several musical compositions in their cultural, political, and historical contexts. This study demonstrates how composers navigated the complexities of identity, nationhood, antisemitism, and religion, and how they turned to music composition to negotiate their individual and collective sense of belonging in postwar Europe as survivors. This research has been supported by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Studies, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the Dutch Cultural Foundation, and the Polish National Agency for Academic Affairs, among others.
The College of Arts