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!  She'll be joined with a special welcome song by the Sardinian multipart singing group, "Cuncordu 'Monte Sindria" (dir. Diego Pani, Fulbright Scholar in Residence to UNM).

Kristina Jacobsen (she/her/lei/bí) is an ethnographer, singer-songwriter, Fulbright Scholar, 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. Jacobsen's second musical ethnography, Sing Me Back Home: Ethnographic Songwriting and Sardinian Language Politics, will be published simultaneously in Italian (NeoClassica Press 2024, trans. Antonio Gambacorta) and in English (University of Toronto Press 2024), and focuses on ethnographic songwriting as a research methodology. While in Sardinia, she also recorded an album (her fourth) of original songs collaboratively written with Sardinian songwriters and language activists, House on Swallow Street, with the Sardinian Label, Talk About Records. Her third book, The Creative Ethnographer’s Notebook, co-edited with ethnographic poet Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor (Routledge, 2024), is a craftbook that seeks to integrate ethnography and the arts in anthropology classrooms and for creative ethnographers from all paths. The Cultural Anthropology Advisor to the WOMAD South Africa Music Festival (2021-2023), Jacobsen founded and facilitates three culturally immersive songwriting retreats: in Sardinia, Italy, and along the historic Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in northern Spain. Jacobsen is an Associate Professor of Songwriting and Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. A touring singer-songwriter, she is one half of the duo Heartstrings, and is the founder of the UNM Honky-Tonk Ensemble and the Songwriting Major at the University of New Mexico.