Atlantic Africans created one of the most revolutionary aesthetic movements of the modern world. From the shores of West African kingdoms to Caribbean plantations and mainland American metropoles, they circulated music of many kinds in the face of enslavement. Audible evidence of this story survives in countless living art forms, yet we know far too little about the contours of African Atlantic musical life in the early modern era. It was during this time period that Black cultures took root in the Americas and transformed global sound. African Musicians in the Atlantic World: Legacies of Sound and Slavery (forthcoming from UVA Press) explores the musical lives of Atlantic Africans during the rise of plantation slavery (1600-1800). The book examines an assemblage of artifacts including published and manuscript records, illustrations, material objects, and musical performances. African Musicians in the Atlantic World argues that it is through listening, and by thinking about sound, that the broader history of music and slavery can best be understood. Ultimately, the project aims to more fully account for the experiences of Africans and their descendants while trumpeting the legacy of performers whose names have largely been forgotten but whose sounds echo still.

Books

African Musicians in the Atlantic World: Legacies of Sound and Slavery (UVA Press, forthcoming).

Digital Sound Studies. Co-editor, with Darren Mueller and Whitney Trettien (Duke 2018).

Other Writing and Media

• Editor, Special Issue on Sound, Reviews in Digital Humanities, 2.1, August 2021.https://reviewsindh.pubpub.org/v2-n8  Digital Sound Studies.
• “In Search of Mr. Baptiste: Early Caribbean Music, Race, and a Colonial Composer.” Early Music, xlix.1, February 2021.
•  “Digital Performance and the Musical Archive of Slavery: Like Running Home,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 49, 2020.
• “A Vision for a New South,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, June 15, 2020
• How Haiti Got Free. Public Books. April 16, 2019.
• Tena, Too, Sings America: Listening to an Enslaved Woman’s Musical Memories of Africa. C19 Podcast. Season 1 Episode 10. June, 18, 2018.
•  “Peculiar Animations: Listening to Afro-Atlantic Music in Caribbean Travel Narratives” Early American Literature 52.3, 2017.
• Fiddling with Freedom: Solomon Northup’s Musical Trade in 12 Years a Slave. Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog, December 16, 2013.