Pamela M. Potter

Language: German, Yiddish

Research/Language Interests: German music, cultural history, visual and performing arts, emigration, race, issues of national identity, historiography, arts and politics, 20th-century Berlin, legacies of German composers (Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, G.F. Handel, J.S. Bach), Yiddish language and culture.

About Me: I hold the Michael Ochs Professorship in German and Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My work concentrates on relating music, the arts, and the writing of cultural history to ideological, political, social, and economic conditions, focusing twentieth-century Germany, Europe, and the United States. My book Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (Yale University Press, 1998) was the first full-scale attempt to examine the field of German musicology in its political, ideological, and economic contexts before, during, and after the Nazi era. It was reviewed in The New York Times and was translated into German in 2000 and Portuguese in 2015, with a forthcoming translation Chinese. My next book, Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts (Weimar and Now series, University of California Press, 2016), raises questions about the uniqueness of Nazi culture and aesthetics and traces the roots of these ideas in West German and Anglophone cultural histories. My forthcoming book, Music Metropolis Berlin, traces the development of Berlin as a center of music from the eighteenth century to the present, examining the unique urban, economic, and demographic characteristics that allowed its music to survive and thrive in spite of its turbulent history. The volume I co-edited with historian Celia Applegate, Music and German National Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2002), explores how music came to be so closely identified with German identity, examining trends in philosophy, literature, politics, and social currents. Another collection, Music in World War II: Coping with Wartime in Europe and the United States, co-edited with Christina Baade and Roberta Marvin (Indiana University Press, 2020), considers the role of music, media, and sound in the lives of soldiers and civilians. Previous honors include the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society; Outstanding Book Award, Choice Magazine; membership in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; and the Vilas Associate Award, the Romnes Faculty Fellowship, the Kellett Mid-Career Award, and the WARF Named Professorship from the University of Wisconsin. I have also received grant support from Fulbright, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the German Academic Exchange, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.

Affiliated Departments: School of Music; Center for German and European Studies.

Education:
-Yale University, Ph.D., Music History, May 1991.
-Yale University, M.Phil., Music History, May 1987.
-Harvard University, A.B. (magna cum laude), Music and History, June 1981.

PAMELA POTTER CV

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Click below to hear discussions of Prof. Potter’s recent books.

Art of Suppression
Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts

Music in World War II
Coping with Wartime in Europe and the United States