From now on, I would like to keep you informed on this blog about research projects I am working on in the field of Metal Studies. With this, we would like to set ourselves apart from other websites where you can mainly find reviews and interviews. Since there are already so many of them, we’ll try a slightly different approach to provide some variety.

For a good year now, I have been busy with a study for which I am analysing Dutch press articles from the 1990s in which journalists dealt with the topic of metal. It’s about regional and national dailies, not music magazines. A publication is planned for spring 2022. Since the book will be published in the “Musicology” series of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, it will be in German. We will use this blog to inform you about some research results in English as well. There will be an open access version, as with all my publications, so anyone interested in the subject can download a free digital edition from my university’s homepage. After all, knowledge is something you want to share – especially in such a young field of research as Metal Studies.

I am particularly pleased that I was able to involve my Epic Metal Blog colleague and friend Aidan Stein for my current project. He has been studying history at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf for just under a year. By the way, this is another thing we have in common, as I also studied history there between 2003 and 2009 before moving to Münster to start my dissertation on right-wing populism in the Netherlands. Aidan contributes three essays to my book, in which he deals, among other things, with the most important stylistic developments in metal that took place in the 1990s. We will let you know about the other topics he focuses on in the future. In any case, I am sure that Aidan’s contributions are a great added value because he works conscientiously and already has a lot of expertise at a young age. For him, this is certainly a good introduction to scientific publishing. And it is always particularly pleasant to work together on such a research project.