- Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Oxford & Junior Research Fellow at St. Catherine’s College
- PhD in ethnomusicology, Columbia University (2009)
- Previously taught at Northwestern University and Stony Brook University
- Research interests: broadly, the intersections of music/sonic culture and subjectivity in urban spaces of the Kenyan postcolony.
I am in the midst of two ongoing research projects, each of which is based on long-term fieldwork in a major Kenyan city. One is based on eighteen months of fieldwork in Mombasa, Kenya, and combines approaches from ethnomusicology, linguistic anthropology, geography, and sound studies. Set to culminate in a monograph entitled Sound and Citizenship: Voice, Place, and Belonging on the Kenyan Coast, this project takes an “ethnographic ear” to vocal expression, emplacement, and cultural citizenship (social belonging in relation to the nation-state) among Kenya’s marginalized coastal Muslims. My other project grows out of my work with the ERC Music and Digitisation Project at Oxford. It examines how global(izing) processes of digitization and neoliberalization have shaped, and taken shape within, entrepreneurial and aesthetic practices in the Kenyan recording industry since the 1990s.
