Featured Student Stories

“I probably heard something when my mom played music in her office,” Rhiannon Muncaster says, recalling the first time she encountered German-language rap music at ten years old. “I didn’t appreciate that rap could happen in another language. And I had never liked rap up until that point. It just changed the game. I thought it was amazing.”

Growing up in Chicago with parents who spoke German, French, Arabic, and Farsi, Rhiannon inherited a predilection for learning languages, becoming fluent in German as a child. “I just like languages, and they come easily for some reason,” she describes. Her passion for languages not only fueled her early interest in German rap music, it also propelled her through undergraduate studies in Spanish and German at the University of Illinois at Chicago, from which she graduated with highest honors.

While earning her bachelor’s degree, Rhiannon initially ruled out graduate studies. “I always had this idea of classical German studies…old dead white guys...” she says. “I had no interest in that at all.” She credits a preview weekend organized by the German Studies Department at the University of Michigan with changing her perception of what kinds of research she could do in pursuit of a Ph.D. in German Studies, including “everything from literature and comic books to ethnomusicology, art history, museum studies, and more.”

Now a third year Ph.D student, Rhiannon has completed the coursework stage of her degree, has spent a year cultivating expertise in teaching at the college level, and is completing preparations for her preliminary exams. The coursework component, she explains, was flexible and helpful: “You have a lot of freedom to tailor whatever you’re learning in seminars to explore how that fits into your own research interests.” In this way, students who come into the program without a firm sense of which faculty members they would like to work with or what specific questions to ask in their research are exposed to the depth and breadth of the faculty’s expertise.

After she passes her preliminary exams, Rhiannon will begin her dissertation research in earnest. She is still in the process of narrowing down her topic but describes her interest in “the marginalization and multicultural identity formation of Arab and Irano-Germans in Germany through rap music.” She is exploring why rap music has become a vehicle for marginalized voices in Germany and Austria and is also interested in understanding “how individuals from these communities use rap music and videos to negotiate their own representation -- how they use music critically as a response to the cultural expectations and stereotypes held by (Austrian and German) society at large, as well as a means to interrogate their own positionality within that society.”

Rhiannon hopes eventually to obtain a position utilizing her multilingual skills and knowledge in the diplomatic service but for now she’s focused on finding quiet places to write. When asked how she unwinds, she responds, “I really like reading horror novels.”