
Contact Information
810 S. Wright Street
M/C 466
Urbana, IL 61801
Research Interests
Middle East and North Africa
British and French Empire
Global History
Comparative Race and Ethnicity
Music and Musicology
Research Description
My dissertation, “Disharmony of Empire: Race and the Making of Modern Musicology in Colonial North Africa,” based on archival research in Morocco, Tunisia, France, Egypt, and Lebanon, seeks to deepen our understanding of how race, ethnicity, national belonging, and inequality were constructed in the colonial encounter in North Africa by centering the world of music and the arts as a crucial site for French colonial visions and governance strategies. It demonstrates that cultural initiatives materially undergirded the violence of colonial rule as well as the racialization of North African society. I also consider the ways in which French narratives collided with an Arabic intellectual tradition that considered Arab music a core part of racial and national identity. Examining sources ranging from scholarly publications and musical transcriptions to conferences and concerts, I argue that contentious musicological debates around Arab, Berber, and Black music and identity in North Africa were not only a lens into broader colonialist and nationalist processes, they also revealed the ongoing formulation of racialized sound worlds that impacted the political and social realms.
Education
B.A. Music Theory and Composition, University of California, Davis
M.A. History, San Francisco State University
Ph.D. expected May 2021, History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Grants
Humanities Research Institute Fellow, 2020-2021
Fulbright IIE Fellowship, Morocco, 2017-2018
Graduate College Dissertation Travel Grant, Tunisia, Summer 2017
Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow, Arabic, 2013-2016
Bastian Transnational Fellow, Summer 2014
Courses Taught
HIST 100: Global History (Teaching Assistant)
HIST 256: Britain and the World since 1688 (Instructor)
HIST 258: 20th Century World to Midcentury (Instructor)