What the Ballad Knows: The Ballad Genre, Memory Culture, and German Nationalism (New Cultural History of Music)
Over the course of the 19th century, ballads proliferated in German-speaking Europe in a truly remarkable range of contexts. Audiences were of course likely encounter balladry in the volumes of Goethe and Schiller, in various anthologies or illustrated editions. But they were just as likely to come across objects billed as ballads in recitation evenings by popular actors, in song-settings by Schubert and Loewe, in piano pieces by Chopin, in the opera house and the concert hall, in mass-produced drawings, paintings and even chinaware. Ballads were poems one could use - schoolteachers used them to train their students' memory (or punish them), women composers used them to assert their place in the musical canon, actors used them to bolster their income, mothers used them to put their children to sleep. Ballads intersected with gender and class, promising to democratize art, while in fact helping make distinctions. In What the Ballad Knows: The Ballad Genre, Memory Culture and German Nationalism, Adrian Daub tells the story of this itinerant genre across media, periods, regions and social strata and shows that, even though it was often positioned as an authentic product of "German spirit," the ballad frequently unsettled and subverted the national project. The popular imagination rooted these poems in pre-modern oral culture, among bards and peasants in the everyday life of common folk. But in fact nineteenth-century ballads were in the end all about modernity – modern modes of association, of attention, of dissemination.
Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University and current Vice President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) and the American Association of Ukrainian Studies (AAUS). Her work explores nation building and identity politics in the post-Soviet region. Her book, Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011) won the American Association for Ukrainian Studies prize for best book in the fields of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture. Her recent work has focused on the sources of citizenship policies in the post-Communist states, comparative memory politics, and religious politics in Ukraine. With Maria Popova, she is currently writing a book on the root causes of the Russo-Ukrainian war, entitled Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States, scheduled to be released in late 2023. 
