Kristina Jacobsen

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We are happy to once again join forces with UNM professor, singer/songwriter and anthropologist Kristina Jacobsen as she celebrates the release of her latest book Sing Me Back Home, which compliments her House on Swallow Street recording. Kristina will share stories from her time in Sardinia and perform songs she wrote while there—a reading/concert combo!

Set on the Italian island of Sardinia, Sing Me Back Home explores language and culture through songwriting as an ethnographic method. Based on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork writing songs with Sardinian musicians, artisans, shepherds, poets, and language activists, Kristina Jacobsen asks, how are Sardinian lives and language ideologies narrated against the backdrop of American music?

The book shows how Sardinian musicians sing their own history between the lines, in songs, in stories about songs, in the recording studio, and in the "stage patter" performed between songs during performances. It reveals how Sardinian songs become a site of transduction where, through the process of songwriting, recording, and performance, the energy from one genre of music and lingua-culture is harnessed to signal another one much closer to home. 

Sing Me Back Home is accompanied by an album of original songs written and recorded in the field, with links to songs in each chapter. It includes songwriting prompts and lyrics, a glossary of key terms, tables to break down theoretical concepts, and photographs from the field. Drawing on work from critical collaborative research, auto-ethnography, public anthropology, arts-based research, and ethnographic poetry, this sensory ethnography offers new ways for us to hear culture through stories and songs.

Kristina Jacobsen (she/her/lei/bi) is an ethnographer, singer-songwriter, and cultural anthropologist. Her research focuses on language reclamation, expressive culture, popular music, and arts-based research methodologies. Her first book, The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language and Diné Belonging (UNC Press, 2017), is based on 2½ years of singing and playing lapsteel guitar with Navajo (Diné) country western bands on the Navajo Nation and was the winner of the 2018 IASPM-US Woody Guthrie Award for most outstanding book on popular music. A Fulbright Scholar, Jacobsen's second musical ethnography, Sing Me Back Home: Ethnographic Songwriting and Sardinian Language Politics will be published simultaneously in Italian (Nota Press 2024) and in English (University of Toronto Press 2024). Jacobsen is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. A touring singer-songwriter, she fronts the feminist honky-tonk band The Merlettes, and is the founder and co-facilitator of the UNM Honky-Tonk Ensemble and the Songwriting Major at UNM.