Dr. Elin Kanhov is an interdisciplinary musicologist (Ph.D. in Musicology from Stockholm University, Sweden) working with perspectives from the posthumanities, the environmental humanities, science and technology studies, post-structuralist philosophy and critical theory. She is a music researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and a core researcher within the Posthumanities Hub (Linköping University, Sweden). Her research on contemporary music and culture is situated at the intersection of the Sixth mass extinction and the Fourth industrial revolution, both which are products and problems of late capitalism, globalisation, and neoliberal culture. She is interested in understanding how music on the one hand is contributing to and feeding the anthropocentric and disruptive aspects of our time, and on the other hand how music can actively, ethically, and aesthetically challenge this current situation. With her focus on posthumanist approaches and methodologies, she is developing an interdisciplinary field of posthumanist music studies.
Kanhov is currently a PI and researcher in the project “Musical Entanglements with AI: Posthumanist Perspectives on Creating, Consuming and Connecting with AI Music”, a 3.5 million SEK and three-year research grant funded by the Swedish Research Council. The project sets out to investigate how posthuman subjects and identities are formed in the encounter between music and artificial intelligence; how experiences, affects, and values arise around AI music; and which musical aesthetic expressions and discourses emanate from this domain. The project was initiated in 2025.
Between 2023-2025, Kanhov was a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC funded MUSAiC project at KTH Royal Institute of Technology where she studied the prospects and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI) as it develops in the musical field. She was part of organizing The First International Conference in AI Music Studies, held in Stockholm in December 2024.
During 2023, Kanhov was a fellow of the Bernadotte programme with a project studying contemporary Swedish art music that engages with the Anthropocene, post-anthropocentric perspectives, and relations between text and music from ecocritical positions.
Kanhov’s PhD thesis in musicology Encounters Between Music and Nature: A Productive and Transversal Approach to Contemporary Music Analysis explores conceptions of nature in contemporary Western art music, and how positions and relations between humans, music and nature are questioned and challenged in that musical sphere. Working with concepts from Deleuze-Guattarian thought, as well as engaging with posthumanist and new materialist thinking, her analyses of contemporary music challenges conceptions of nature that are perceived as rigid and in opposition to what is conceived as culture. Studying affinities between humans and animals, coexistence between humans and nature, and music-natures as disruptive and resisting harmony and order, her thesis explores how music can be a particular process of knowledge production when it comes to exploring material-discursive nature-cultures.
Elin Kanhov, Ph.D. 