I grew up in East Germany (when it was still the German Democratic Republic) and earned a teaching certification for Secondary Education for German and English from the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg (Germany) in 2008. After that, I spent 18 months teaching German to students at Texas Tech University, while also getting a Master in German and a Minor in Linguistics. I enjoyed English-speaking academia and teaching college-age students and decided to get my PhD at the Pennsylvania State University in 2015 with my dissertation “The Concert Hall as Heterotopia: Sounds and Sights of Resistance in the Leipzig Gewandhaus 1970-1989.” I also received the Harold F. Martin Graduate Assistant Outstanding Teaching Award at Penn State. From then on, I kept spending my time with questions of artistic expressions of social change, musical engagement with socio-political issues, and the reception history of art in the GDR. My interdisciplinary research focuses on East German music, architecture, and the fine arts during the 1970s and 1980s. I have published on works of the band Rammstein, contemporary HipHop artists, and Gustav Mahler, and have been working on projects about the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, the reception of Mahler in East Germany, and Rammstein’s new song “Deutschland.” My next project will move from classical to popular music and trace the work of female rock musicians in the GDR.