Francesca Inglese

Dr. Inglese is an ethnomusicologist who researches how sound illuminates the uneven global and local dynamics among power, difference, and value, and the ways musicians use their creative agency to challenge the social order, create connection and value, and imagine new futures.

Dr. Inglese is the author of Remixing Race after Apartheid: Kaapse Klopse in South Africa (Wesleyan University Press’ Music/Culture Series, 2026), which draws on immersive fieldwork to explore how participants in this South African carnival tradition use sound to mediate racial identity in the postapartheid era. Her research has appeared in Ethnomusicology, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Journal of the Society for American Music, Women & Music, African Music, Journal of Popular Music Education (forthcoming), amongst others.

Her current book project, Dark Angels, reframes the violin by attending to its integral place in the development of Black American popular music genres, documenting a long genealogy of genre-bending violinists whose radical innovations have been critically important but long ignored; and illuminating 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.