Melanie Plesch
Endeavour Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
The Endeavour Fellowships are awarded by the Federal Department of Education, Science and Training. Its aim is to attract high achieving scholars from around the world to undertake research or study in Australia. In 2006 only nineteen fellowships were awarded worldwide.
Dr Plesch received her PhD from the University of Melbourne in 1998 and is currently Associate Professor at the University of Buenos Aires (Faculty of Philosophy and Letters) and the Catholic University of Argentina (Faculty of Musical Arts). Her work focuses on the intersections of music, politics and society, with particular emphasis on the relationship between music and the construction of national identities.
Based on her extensive research on Argentine musical nationalism Dr Plesch has devised a theoretical framework that attempts to explain the dynamics of the construction of national musical languages. Her approach combines recent theories about nationalism, mainly Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined communities”, and Hobsbawm’s concept of “invention of tradition”, with a rhetorical and topical musical analysis derived from the work of Leonard Ratner and Kofi Agawu. In her research project she intends to test this theory against the Australian case, exploring the strategies of national identity construction employed by Australian composers and comparing them with the Argentinian case. Comparative studies between Australia and Argentina have a relatively long-standing tradition, but so far have been restricted to the field of economic and political development.