On March 28 and 29, CHAT and the Department of Music, in coordination with many other departments of Tufts, welcomed distinguished members of the Asante kingdom, dancers, drummers, and scholars from across the globe to the International Symposium on the Musical Arts of Africa.
On March 28, scholars from universities across the world discussed ethnomusicology from various perspectives, with a focus on African music.
On March 29, Tufts welcomed Oheneba Akwasi Abayie, Royal Historian of the Asante, for an oral history of the Asate for the past 500 years. Abayie discussed the importance of the Royal Stool, and the matrilinial line of the Asante people starting in the 17th centurty to the present. The event also included a drumming performance, dancing, and a procession of queens and distinguished guests of the Asante. Abayie's speech was the 2025 Coit-Phelps lecture for the Center for the Humanities. The title of his keynote lecture was "Empire Rising: The Dynastic History of Asante from 17th to 21st Century."
The Coit-Phelps Fund was established in 2012, through a generous gift from Susan Napier (Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric, International Literary and Cultural Studies, Tufts University) and her husband Stephen Coit (portraitist and former teaching assistant at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and the School of Arts and Sciences, Tufts University) to support the Center for the Humanities at Tufts in its efforts to create a forum for sustained intellectual vibrancy across the disciplines of the humanities and beyond. With a love of the arts, the donors especially intended the Coit-Phelps fund to facilitate the intercultural contribution of the creative imagination. Since 2012, The Center for Humanities has used this fund to advance interdisciplinary work in the humanities through an annual lecture, conference, or symposium. More details are available here.
Pictures from the event are available here. All pictures are copyright 2025 ofTufts University.
