Kathryn Agnes Huether, PhD
**While I was honored to be featured on Tablet Magazine's Unorthodox podcast as the 'Gentile of the Week,' it was not without reservations. Identities are complex, and nothing is ever a simple 'either/or.' At the time, I had not yet undergone my conversion to Judaism—a process that, like all aspects of identity, resists easy categorization. To truly understand someone as an individual and their reasoning, it’s important to avoid assumptions and not read too much into labels.
assessing the world through sonic interactions
Kathryn Agnes Huether is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Antisemitism Studies at UCLA’s Initiative to Study Hate and the Leve Center for Jewish Studies. She received her PhD in musicology with a graduate minor in cultural studies from the University of Minnesota in 2021 and holds a second master’s in religious studies from the University of Colorado—Boulder. She has held visiting appointments at Bowdoin College and Vanderbilt University and was the 2021–2022 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research and American University Postdoctoral Fellow.
Her work bridges academic research with public engagement, addressing how sound mediates Holocaust memory, antisemitism, racial violence, and the politics of the present. She has published in Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and Yuval: Studies of the Jewish Music Research Centre, and served as a guest editor for Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog with her series on “Hate and NonHuman Listening.” At the American Musicological Society, she was an invited speaker for the 2023 panel “Antisemitism: Views from the Field,” and, recognizing the urgent need for scholarship to move beyond insularity and confront pressing political realities, she initiated the 2025 national roundtable “Music, Silence, and Social Action in an Age of Perpetual Crisis,” bringing together leading scholars in the field. She also represented UCLA’s Initiative to Study Hate at the 2025 Eradicate Global Hate Summit and is the current editor of ISH’s public-facing blog.
Her current projects extend this concern into digital culture, analyzing how Holocaust and atrocity memory is refracted through platformed soundscapes—such as the Nova Music Festival exhibition’s sonic staging after October 7—and how antisemitism and other forms of hate circulate through viral audio on TikTok. Developing concepts such as “sonic hate,” “sonic contagion,” and “sonic wallpaper,” her research shows how digital listening practices amplify prejudice, fragment memory, and normalize bigotry in ways that visual analysis alone cannot capture. Her first book, Sounding Trauma: Mediating Memory, examines the impact of sound technologies on Holocaust memory, while her second, Sounding the Holocaust in Film (forthcoming, Indiana University Press), serves as a teaching guide to sound in Holocaust cinema.