Dr. Kristina Jacobsen Awarded CORE Fellowship to Study Song, Food and Connection
Departmental News
Posted: Aug 04, 2025 - 08:00am
Dr. Kristina Jacobsen has been awarded a CORE Fellowship to study song, food and connection for her projects Three Miles and Hour and Together at the Table. The Camino de Santiago, also known as the Way of St. James, is a network of pilgrimage routes in Northwestern Spain that converge at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, located in the Galicia region of Spain.
There are over 200 recognized Camino de Santiago routes in Europe today. The longest one is the Camino Francés or the French Way, which is approximately 492 miles long and can take about 30-35 days to complete from start to finish. These routes attract between 400,000 – 500,000 people each year.
Kristina Jacobsen, an associate professor of ethnomusicology, songwriting and anthropology, at The University of New Mexico’s music and anthropology departments, has walked many miles of the Camino herself, meeting new friends and writing songs along the way. These experiences have inspired her most recent research projects.
Jacobsen has been awarded a CORE research fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in Helsinki, Finland. She will leave this August for the research-specific, two-year residency program.
Sixteen researchers were selected from 453 applications for the 2025-2026 CORE Fellowship program. The program provides awardees with the opportunity to focus on their research projects without administrative duties, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration.
Receiving this fellowship has significant meaning for Jacobsen. Professionally, it will enable her to dedicate herself entirely to her research and broaden her professional network in Europe, working and collaborating alongside 30 other international fellows at the Collegium across the Social Sciences and the Humanities.
Artistically and personally, she will be able to immerse herself in Finnish culture fully and begin to learn a new language, all while researching, collaborating and writing songs for her two creative ethnographic projects: Three Miles an Hour and Together at the Table.
“My hope through my projects is to gain a deeper understanding of the Camino and raise awareness of the linguistic and national diversity that exists along this pilgrimage route,” Jacobsen said. “I want to put faces to the service workers who work the Camino Francés, many of whom are from Colombia and Brazil.”
Jacobsen’s second research project, Together at the Table, builds on Three Miles an Hour. It is a touring project where she will collaborate with a professional chef to pair six original songs with a multicourse meal that explores food as a cultural encounter. She hopes to begin the tour in New Mexico, then travel to Scandinavia, Italy and finish on the Camino at one of the places that inspired the project. The first song in the portfolio has been completed, and you can listen to it here.
“My projects are the study of connecting and slowness,” she said. “Slowness influences the way I experience things, and I would like to understand how that shift affects not just me, but those around me.”
As an associate professor of music and anthropology at UNM, Jacobsen primarily focuses on arts-based research methods, sociocultural and linguistic ethnomusicology, and songwriting as a collaborative research method, which she refers to as ethnographic songwriting. Many of her collaboration outcomes include albums or live performances.
To learn more about Jacobson’s research and culturally immersive songwriting workshops, visit her webpage.
