Alexandra Birch

Dr. Alexandra Birch has a diverse career as a violinist and scholar. She has toured extensively in the USA, Asia, Russia, and Europe in over 20 countries including performances in Carnegie Hall, the Bolshoi Theatre, and is a prizewinner in numerous national and international competitions. Dr. Birch holds a BMus, MMus, and DMA from Arizona State University where she was a student of Katherine McLin; she is presently a PhD student in History at UC Santa Barbara working with Adrienne Edgar. Dr. Birch's research focuses on recovered music and the arts under duress. As an Alexander Grass Memorial Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, she released Soviet Memories (2019) and Musical Stolpersteine (2020) and Vnye (2021) for the 30-year anniversary of the collapse of the USSR. Her performances and albums feature recovered scores from her research in international archives alongside major classical sonatas. Her upcoming  monograph Hitler's Goetterdaemmerung: Music and The Orchestration of War and Genocide in Europe examines Wagnerian myth and music as central elements of Nazi statecraft and genocide At the Wilson Center, Dr. Birch is working on recovered music from the Soviet Gulag including Ukrainian composer Vsevolod Zaderatsky's violin concerto and Mikhail Nosyrev's Capriccio.