Doctoral Student Fellow
Doctoral Student, Department of Music, Graduate School of Arts & Science
Anna is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Music, specializing in sonic cultures and philosophies of the western Mediterranean, North Africa and the Arab Gulf. She joins the Humanities Initiative from NYU Abu Dhabi, where she was an inaugural recipient of the NYUAD Humanities Research Fellowship. Anna’s scholarship combines history, ethnography and philosophy at the intersection of music and sound studies. Its locus is sawt—an Arabic concept that fuses all forms of acoustical resonance with voice, presence and soundness of being. She is particularly interested in how sawt is deployed within heterodox forms of Islam, and in how sound and human integrity are entangled in the civic life of port cities. In her dissertation, she examines these dynamics through a historical ethnography of bare life, sonorous matter and technologies of the soul in Tangier, Morocco. To aid abetting interests in North African psych rock, urban art musics of the pre-oil Gulf, and early gramophone cultures of the Islamic world, she collects old 45s and 78s produced in the region.