Kirsten Barker (Music) is a 2025–2026 HRI Graduate Fellow. Her current research project, “Max of the Antarctic: Stories of ‘Wilderness’ in Music and Word,” explores how English composer Peter Maxwell Davies experienced the southernmost continent as “wilderness” and encapsulated both real and imagined Antarcticas in music and personal accounts of his trip.
Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty and graduate students through a year of dedicated research and writing in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment.
What is unique about your research on this topic?
My research is on British music about the Antarctic since 1900. Britain has a long history of polar exploration, and a wealth of musical instruments and music across genres inspired by the region and its explorers. The project that I brought to the Fellows Seminar is an article that focuses on English composer Peter Maxwell Davies’s symphony commissioned by the British Antarctic Survey at the end of the twentieth century. There is very little scholarship about the music and art sponsored by the British Antarctic Survey and other scientific agencies. Environmental Humanities methods like ecocriticism and environmental history enable me to use music like Davies’s symphony as case studies for how music can be caught up in networks of scientific, geopolitical, and commercial interests.
What drives your interest in this research?
I’ve always been interested in music about specific places and landscapes. I was drawn to British Antarctic music in particular because of the quantity of music about the region, as well as the mythologies and ideologies ascribed to it. My interest has grown as I’ve learned more about how the historic expeditions (like those of Robert F. Scott and Ernest Shackleton) have acquired their own significance in the public imagination and how these cultural figures and the region’s ecological fragility are used to bolster geopolitical agendas, which can be part of music about the region and its history.
How has the fellowship seminar shaped the way you’re approaching your research?
Participating in the Fellows Seminar has been really valuable for me. Throughout the year, I’ve appreciated the exposure to literature, scholars, and concepts that I hadn’t previously encountered, as well as seeing familiar literature in new contexts. The openness of our discussions and everyone’s willingness to share their expertise and questions in relation to each week’s material has been beneficial. Receiving interdisciplinary feedback and learning about other fellows’ projects and research processes has given me new perspectives on my work that I’m already applying to how I approach my time in the archives and to my conception of my dissertation.