Francesca Inglese

Dr. Inglese is an ethnomusicologist, popular music scholar, and musician. Her teaching and research are driven by the question of how sounds produce experiences of subjectivity, sociality, and place. In particular, she is concerned with the ways in which making and listening to music illuminate the relationships between power, difference, and regimes of value, and how musicians use their creative agency to create community and value, and imagine new possibilities for the future. Some of the courses she teaches include: “Music & the Racial Imagination,” “American Roots Music,” “Musical Communities of Boston,” “Global Music Cultures,” and “Music, Noise, Silence.”

Her forthcoming monograph, Remixing Race After Apartheid: Kaapse Klopse and Coloured Identity in South Africa, explores the role popular musicking plays in negotiating race, space, and value in contemporary South Africa. Her current project, Dark Angels: Black Violinists and the Race of Musical Instruments, 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. Her interest in American popular music is illuminated by previous research and writing on the outsider world of the American song-poem industry in relation to technology, gender, and capitalism, and Jewish women “coon shouters” in the early 20th century.

Her articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology (2024), the Journal of Popular Music Studies (2024), the Journal of the Society for American Music (2013, and forthcoming 2025), Women & Music (2022), African Music (2014), American Music (forthcoming 2025), amongst others.

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

As a violinist she has played and taught a diverse array of repertoire, including Baroque, jazz, bluegrass, and Carnatic music. Before coming to Northeastern, she taught at Dartmouth College and Brown University.