Congratulations to Kira Thurman, who will be a Faculty Fellow at the UM Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies during the 2016-2017 academic year. She will use her release time to focus on writing her book, Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. As a Fellow, she will participate in Institute programs while drafting a chapter that examines how African American concert singers in the 1920s and 30s such as Marian Anderson earned the reputation for sonically transforming themselves into Germans on stage. Drawing from musicology, performance studies, critical race theory, and German studies, her chapter explores the relationship between sonic experiences and identity formations in interwar Central Europe.