Kim Sauberlich is an Atlantic Music scholar who focuses on the intersection of embodied performance and racialized knowledge production. Sauberlich's dissertation and book project entitled Black Orpheus: Musical Scenarios in Atlantic Rio de Janeiro (1808-1888) examines Atlantic performances in the city of Rio de Janeiro, from the 1808 transfer of the Portuguese court to Brazil’s 1888 official abolition of slavery. Rio was the only city in the history of modern empires that housed both a liberal bourgeoisie aspiring to European ideals and enslaved African men and women, offering a case of “metropolitan reversal.” By examining musical biographies, comic plays, parodies of Western classics, and song collections from Rio de Janeiro’s Biblioteca Nacional archives in conjunction with Central African philosophies of music, Sauberlich shows that Rio can reverse center-periphery binaries and offer a space for studying the transmission of Bantu as well as racial-colonial cultural memories.
Sauberlich grew up in Brazil and England and completed her BMus and MMus degrees at King’s College, London. Sauberlich's project is funded by a Berkeley-Mellon Fellowship, a dissertation fellowship from the Hellman Fellows Fund, an Arts Research Centre Fellowship, a Townsend Centre Dissertation Fellowship, and a Stanford Mabelle McLeod Lewis fellowship. Sauberlich has also received a Harold S. Powers World Travel Fund Award and an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship from the American Musicological Society.
Kim was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2019 – she was chosen in the Graduate Fellow category.
Atlantic musics, Latin America and the Caribbean, Critical Race Theory, Performance Studies, embodiment, phenomenology, popular musics