Faculty

I am an ethnographer and anthropologist of music from Mexico City. My work deals with the intercalations of music, difference, and power in Latin America and, broadly speaking, with the politics of sound. I think about the ways music reveals latent registers of feeling, sense, and history; and sound’s intersections with media and technology, law and governance, movement and migration, faith and cosmology, and other dimensions of social life. My long-term ethnographic research commitments are in Michoacán, Mexico. I also work in Mexico City and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

My first...

I am a scholar of music and sound with ongoing ethnographic commitments in Japan, Okinawa, Ethiopia, and the US. Broadly speaking, my research explores the political and affective affordances of (musical) sounds in contexts ranging from everyday life to social movements, primarily in contemporary Japan. My scholarship is driven by my interest in exploring how auditory culture produces social space, and how sound’s materiality and ephemerality are entangled with affect and sociality. In other words, I investigate how the culturally particular ways in which people listen to and make (musical...

A historian of music and music theory, I focus my research on music and state-building—empire-building, to be more specific. Empires are by default players and products of transregional processes encompassing diverse peoples, territories, and traditions. Hence the other throughline of my work: a comparative perspective, informed by my current expertise in early modern Europe and late-imperial China (16th to 18th centuries) and by my new pivot to ancient and early imperial China (8...