I’m an ethnographer interested in how people make and remake social worlds through musical and sonic expression, and I focus in particular on the entanglements of music and global capitalism across northwest Africa’s Sahel and Sahara desert regions. My research accordingly attends to the global circulation of Sahelian music, the interplay of cultural heritage and popular culture, and the transformation of social values in the face of myriad environmental and economic injustices.
My current project locates music at the center of how Tuareg communities reimagine themselves over a multigenerational transition from nomadic life to urban settlement. While Tuareg guitar music originated in subversive protest anthems that helped foment Tuareg rebellions in Mali and Niger in the 1990s, my work concerns the trajectory of Tuareg music as a post-rebellion popular music. Artists like Tinariwen, Bombino, Mdou Moctar, and many others have contributed to a vibrant Sahelian and trans-Saharan guitar culture while also tapping into Global North narratives of rock music as protest, expanding the commodification of Tuareg culture in transformative ways.
My interdisciplinary research engages with scholarship in economic ethnomusicology, the anthropology of value, sound studies, and research on youth cultures and media in Africa. Informed by fieldwork in Niger, Mali, and the US, my work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright program, and the West African Research Association, among other funders.
I am a Lecturer of Musicology at Southern Methodist University (SMU) and a 2024-25 ACLS Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. Additionally, I co-chair the African and African Diasporic Music Section of the Society of Ethnomusicology and previously led the Association of African Studies Programs. Before joining SMU, I served as Assistant Director of the African Studies Center at Boston University and earned my PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Blog
This site originated as a blog that I developed to serve two core purposes: to update family and colleagues on my travel and research, and to establish a sandbox in which to develop initial thoughts on my experiences, reading, and listening. I no longer update the blog, but since readers occasionally find it useful, I’ve decided to keep it online.
The views expressed here are my own, and do not reflect the opinions of the institutions that have supported my research, including the US Department of State, the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, and American Councils for International Education.