Category: Student Section
Bios and news items for graduate students
Columbia ethnomusicology PhD student
Ryan Skinner has just published his first children's book:
Sidikiba's Kora Lesson.
Ten year-old Sidikiba is about to be initiated into the world of the kora, a twenty-one stringed West African harp performed by his family for seventy generations. To become a kora player, like his father and grandfather before him, Sidikiba must honor and respect the wisdom of his elders, trust in the mystical secrets of his community, and, above all else, be patient and practice hard...
Sidikiba's Kora Lesson is the story of a child's encounter with a rich cultural heritage set in a modern African city, where learning to balance the new and the old is part of growing up. Through sound, pictures, and text, Sidikiba's Kora Lesson comes alive for readers and music lovers of all ages!
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(A.B., Harvard University, 2008, cum laude in field) Samuel's current research focuses on citizenship, language policy, and immigration in Quebec. read more »
(B.A. in Music [flute performance] and Religious Studies, Lawrence
University 2002; M.A. in Ethnomusicology, Columbia 2005). Anna's
undergraduate work focused on music/sound in Hindu and Buddhist
practice. Her M.A. thesis, "Conflict and Confluence: Constructing and
Crossing Boundaries at the Ahiri Institute for Indian Music and Dance,"
examined Indian classical performers’ representation of Indian heritage
in intercultural situations in New York City. Anna's dissertation
project addresses the role of an emerging Nepali popular genre, dohori
git, in rural-urban migrants' negotiation of gendered national
identity. Work based on this research was presented at the 2006 meeting
of IASPM-USA. Her research interests include Nepali and other Himalayan
musics, media and circulation, performance theory, and the role of
music and sound in development and social movements. Anna has been a
Columbia Teaching Fellow and has received the FLAS for summer study of
Nepali (2004), and the Columbia Summer Travel Grant for research in
Nepal (2005). Her dissertation research is being supported by
Fulbright-Hays and the Social Science Research Council.
Email: ams2110@columbia.edu
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(BA in Slavic Regional Studies and Music, Barnard College, 2003) is
interested in music in diaspora, particularly in processes of nostalgia
and ideologies of authentic experience. Her undergraduate research
focused on music of post-Soviet Ukraine, post-Communist Poland,
Bulgaria, Hungary and the former Yugoslavia, culminating in a thesis on
appropriations of folk symbology in post-Soviet Ukrainian rock and
avant garde festivals. Currently, she is focusing on the Ukrainian
diasporas of Brazil and Argentina. In addition to her ethnomusicologial
pursuits, Maria performs many kinds of music on the accordion, piano,
and oboe.
See Maria's Accordion project website
Email:
ms2147@columbia.edu
(B.M. in Sound Engineering Arts and Jazz Performance from William Paterson University, 2005; M.A. in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University, 2007) is an ethnographer, a live recording and reinforcement sound engineer, and a jazz saxophonist. His M.A. thesis entitled, "Sounding the World: The Live Sound Engineering of World Music in New York City," explores the extent to which the intercultural encounter and negotiation between American live sound engineers and musicians from a diverse set of traditional performance practices drastically shape the technological mediation of musical sound. Currently, Whitney conducts continued ethnographic research on live sound engineering as the basis for his upcoming dissertation. This work intends to explore the dynamic subjectivity of live sound engineers as working class laborers through the social life of fidelity: the faithfulness of a sound’s reproduction. Whitney positions this research within the scholarship on the relationships between both music and technology and science and society. As a saxophonist, Whitney has worked in the New York City jazz and world music scene for over 7 years, playing with artists as diverse as Babatunde Olatunji and Clark Terry. He has worked as a live sound engineer for many years, first as an apprentice of his father and later as a freelance engineer throughout the tri-state area. His most recent engineering work includes his work with Jazzmobile, providing live jazz concerts throughout many neighborhoods in NYC.
Visit Whitney's website
Email: wjs2105@columbia.edu
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(B.A. magna cum laude 2000, French and Francophone Studies,
Carleton College; M.A. 2005, M.Phil. 2006, Ph.D. 2009, Ethnomusicology, Columbia
University) studies musical performance, listening, space, sound, subjectivity, and ethics in Africa and its European and American diasporas. Ryan recently defended his dissertation (Artistiya: Popular Music and Personhood in Postcolonial Bamako, Mali) on popular musical expression, artistic personhood, and postcolonial history in Mali, West Africa. He has also conducted and published studies on immigration, diaspora formation, and musical identity among West African communities in New York City.
Over the past ten years, Ryan has conducted extensive fieldwork in West
Africa, Europe, and the United States, focusing on musical performance
and listening practices among Mande peoples worldwide.
In his Master’s Thesis, “Jeliya in New York City: An Ethnography of
Space, Travel, and Practice in Urban America” (2005), Ryan discusses
the interrelation of migratory experiences, musical expression, and
cultural identity in the Mande diaspora of New York City. In an
article, "Determined Urbanites: Diasporic Jeliya in the 21st Century"
(Mande Studies Vol. 6, 2004), Ryan elucidates a modern "culture of
travel" among West African musicians practicing an increasingly global
tradition of praise singing, instrumental performance, storytelling,
and dance known as jeliya. A forthcoming article in the journal Popular Music (29/1, 2010), "Civil Taxis and Wild Trucks: The Dialectics of Space and Subjectivity in Dimanche à Bamako" presents a close reading (or listening) of Amadou & Mariam’s most recent album, Dimanche à Bamako (2004), meaning "Sunday in Bamako," produced "by and with" world music maverick Manu Chao. The article considers how the album musically renders, through sound and lyrical expression, the tensions of what may be called "global modernity" in postcolonial Africa and its diasporas. Ryan is also the author an illustrator of the children's book Sidikiba's Kora Lesson (Beaver's Pond Press, 2008), describing kora apprenticeship in contemporary Mali.
Ryan’s current dissertation work focuses on the musical politics
and poetics of personhood in postcolonial Bamako, Mali. Specifically, his study engages with a particular community of urban artists – popular musicians – whose lives and works are locally glossed by the Bamana term “artistiya,” a neologism meaning “artistic personhood.” As a study of personhood among artists in Bamako, Ryan's work emphasizes the particular ethical concerns that artists daily confront in a postcolonial society structured by clientelism, plagued by corruption, and burdened by poverty. Fieldwork for this project was supported by dissertation research fellowships from the Social Science Research Council (International Dissertation Research Fellowship) and Wenner-Gren Foundation. Data analysis and write-up have been supported by a fifth-year dissertation writing fellowship from the Department of Music (Columbia University) and a Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Writing Fellowship (Woodrow Wilson Foundation). Learn more about Ryan's other projects here.
Email: rts2104@columbia.edu
(MM in Piano Performance and Pedagogy from the Hochschule für Musik,
Köln, Germany 1995 with a thesis on "Traditional Forms of Music Making
in the Cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa"; Certificate in African Studies
from the Institute of African Studies at Columbia with a final research
paper on "Cultural Nationalism in Guinea and Les Ballets Africains;
1947-1967;" MA and MPhil in Ethnomusicology from Columbia) wrote an MA
thesis at Columbia entitled "African Dance in New York City -
Constructing and Negotiating Identities"; MPhil 2002). Her areas of
interest are West Africa and Afghanistan. She is currently conducting
dissertation field research on urban popular music in Togo, West
Africa. She served as TA for the Asian Music Humanities and the Western
Music Humanities courses at Columbia, as well as an editorial assistant
for the ICTM UNESCO collection project.
Email: ms829@columbia.edu
(BA in Music and Russian Regional from Barnard College, 2002; M.A., M.Phil. in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University, 2005, 2006). Lauren Ninoshvili is currently preparing a dissertation on the use of
vocables in contemporary Georgian folk-fusion music. Her fieldwork,
carried out primarily in Tbilisi, was supported by an Individual
Advanced Research Opportunities (IARO) grant from the International
Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). Lauren has presented her work at
academic conferences in the US and Europe. Her article, “Report from
the Kitchen Sink: The Supra and the Seeds of a Georgian Feminism”
appears in the edited volume Nation in Formation: Inclusion and
Exclusion in Central and Eastern Europe (London: UCL-SSEES, 2007).
Lauren’s research interests include the folk and sacred polyphony of
the South Caucasus Republic of Georgia, language and music, translation
theory, and the language of world music. She is book reviews editor for
Current Musicology, Columbia’s peer-reviewed journal.
Email: ln2106@columbia.edu
