Francesca Inglese

Francesca Inglese is an ethnomusicologist, historian, and musician whose scholarship investigates how African and African diasporic communities deploy sound and embodied practice as vehicles for knowledge production, identity formation, and social transformation. She uses multiple methods and an interdisciplinary lens to analyze how sounds illuminate the uneven global and local dynamics among power, difference, and value, and to center the ways individuals and groups use their creative agency to challenge the social order, create connection and value, and imagine new futures.

Her forthcoming book, Remixing Race after Apartheid: Kaapse Klopse in South Africa (Wesleyan University Press’ Music/Culture Series) is an ethnography of Kaapse klopse, a South African carnival tradition, and it uses this genre as a critical lens to explore how sound mediates racial identity in the postapartheid era. Drawing on immersive fieldwork, interviews, and performance analysis, the book employs methods from sensory ethnography, sound studies, and critical race theory to foreground participants’ lived experiences and aesthetic practices.

Her current book project, Dark Angels, reframes the violin by attending to its integral place in the development of Black American popular music genres; documents a long genealogy of genre-bending Black violinists whose radical innovations have been critical, but long ignored; and illuminates the ways in which musical instruments become richly layered with social signification, continually transformed in the hands of musicians.

Since 2020, she has worked in collaboration with the Transformative Culture Project (Dorchester, MA) to address inequitable access to music education in Boston through the creation of a popular music program for high school students from intensely segregated Boston public schools called Beyond Creative @ NU.

As a violinist she has studied, taught, and performed a diverse array of repertoire, including Baroque, jazz, bluegrass, and Carnatic music in India, Scotland, Iceland, and the United States. She has taught at Dartmouth College and Brown University.