Francesca Inglese

Assistant Professor of Music, Affiliate Professor of Cultures, Societies and Global Studies, Coordinator of Ethnomusicology

Francesca Inglese (she/her) is an ethnographer, historian, musician, and teacher. She is an Assistant Professor in the Music Department and is also affiliated with the Africana Studies Program.

Her research focuses on music and race | sound and urban spatial politics | listening as a critical cultural practice | American and African Diasporic music and dance | the social life of musical instruments. In particular, she is interested in understanding the ways in which music-making and listening shape affective experiences of subjectivity, sociality, and place; exploring how music reinforces and reimagines social constructions of difference; and working closely with communities to create meaningful social change.

Her ethnographic book project, Remixing Race After Apartheid, explores the role popular musicking plays in negotiating race, space, and value in contemporary South Africa. It centers the experiences of members of Cape Town’s numerous Kaapse klopse (“Clubs of the Cape”), multigenerational parading music social clubs that have their roots in the music of the Cape’s heterogenous slave population, American blackface minstrelsy, and globally circulating popular music. The dissertation (2016, Brown University), on which this book is based, received the Joukowsky Outstanding Dissertation Prize in the Humanities. Related articles address the intersection of motherhood, social activism, and respectability politics in music education initiatives in Cape Town (Women & Music 2022); the re-appropriation of urban space through sound and embodied practice in the annual Cape Town Minstrel Carnival (African Music 2014); and the sociality of listening in cover song performances in Kaapse klopse competitions (Ethnomusicology, forthcoming 2024).

Her current interdisciplinary and multi-methods research project, Dark Angels: Black Violinists and the Race of Musical Instruments, uses the violin as a lens through which to reimagine the history of American music. Cutting across musical genres (classical, jazz, country, and rock) and historical time periods (the 17th century to the present), it reframes the violin by attending to its integral place in the development of Black music genres; documents a long genealogy of genre-bending Black violinists whose radical innovations in sound and style have been critical, but long ignored; and illuminates the ways in which musical instruments become layered with social signification.

Her interest in American music and historical ethnomusicology is illuminated by previous writing on the outsider world of the American song-poem industry in relation to technology, gender, and capitalism (Journal of the Society for American Music 2013) and a master’s thesis on the sonic and embodied legacy of blackface minstrelsy in the performances of Jewish women “coon shouters” in the early 20th century.

Since 2020, she has worked alongside colleague 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.

Her research and writing have been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, and International Affairs at Brown University. Her work has been published in the Journal of the Society of American Music, Ethnomusicology, Women & Music, African Music, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, amongst others. 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 currently serves as Co-Chair of the Dance, Movement & Gesture Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

At Northeastern, she teaches courses that cross the border of musicology, popular music studies, and ethnomusicology. Before coming to Northeastern, she taught at Dartmouth College and Brown University.

She completed a PhD in ethnomusicology at Brown University and holds a BA in music composition from Vassar College as well as a certificate in Carnatic violin, voice, and mridangam performance and theory from Brhaddhvani: Research and Training Centre for Musics of the World in Chennai, India.