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The University of Southampton
MusicPart of Humanities

Fellowship Award for Southampton Postgraduate

Published: 27 October 2014

Music postgraduate student Austin Glatthorn has been awarded a doctoral fellowship at the prestigious Leibniz-Institute for European History (IEG) in Mainz, Germany. The fellowship will support Austin in the final stages of completing his PhD project, ‘The Theatre of Politics and the Politics of Theatre: Music as Representational Culture in the Twilight of the Holy Roman Empire’.

Austin’s thesis investigates music culture in the last two decades of the Holy Roman Empire, from 1786-1806. Shaped by the pro-Prussian narratives of nineteenth-century German nationalist historiography, many scholars have used the Reich as a tool to explain the hardships Germany faced from the dissolution of the Empire in 1806 until well past the Second World War. In musicology, the Reich earns hardly a mention and when it does, it is often misunderstood and confused with an empire that never actually existed, the ‘Habsburg Empire’. Set within an interpretation of the Holy Roman Empire as explored by historian Joachim Whaley, Austin’s investigation comprises a series of case studies that works on two levels: music’s place within a Holy Roman imperial identity, and detailed examples of how music was used as a mouthpiece for political representation in the final years of a millennium-old empire.

In September 2014 Austin returned to Southampton from a year in Germany where he conducted archival research supported by a grant from the DAAD. His fellowship at the Leibniz-Institute for European History (Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte) will allow him to return to Germany in 2015, where he will be able to use the institute’s resources while finishing his thesis.

Fellowship Award for Austin Glatthorn
Austin Glatthorn
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