PS Ph.D. Candidate, Isaac Silber
PS Ph.D. candidate, Isaac Silber (he/they), has been awarded the GSAS Predoctoral Summer Fellowship. With the Fellowship, Isaac plans to spend time between Philadelphia and New York City, visiting the Drexel University Sigma Sound Studios Collection archive, interviewing for his dissertation chapter on neo-soul jam sessions in the Soulquarian era, and writing.
Isaac is a multi-instrumentalist sound designer and recording engineer based in Brooklyn, New York. Some of his work has been felt/heard/seen in venues like Performance Space New York, The Kitchen, The Academy of Arts and Letters, Center for Performance Research, Montréal, arts interculturels, Nowadays, many West/Philly basements and bars, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the ICA at VCU, CA2M, Madrid, New York Live Arts, The Museum of Pop Culture, and on the internet. He is currently in his fifth year of the PhD program in Performance Studies, where his research focuses on the entanglement between underground forms of music-making, black feminist and queer of color critique, and the dissolution of whiteness and/as individual subjectivity. His dissertation focuses on musical entanglements between Philadelphia and New York City, in between soul and dance music from the late 1960s-the present.