Ingrid Monson

Ingrid Monson is Quincy Jones Professor of African American music at Harvard University. 

She has served as Interim Dean of Arts and Humanities at Harvard and chair of the Department of Music.  Monson is the author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (Oxford University Press, 2007), winner of the Woody Guthrie Award of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music; Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) winner of the Irving Lowens Book Award of the Society for American Music; and an edited a volume entitled the African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (Garland/Routledge 2000). 

Her article, “Hearing, Seeing, and Perceptual Agency” (Critical Inquiry 2008) explores the implications of work on cognition and perception for poststructural theoretical issues in the humanities. 

She has been a Guggenheim Fellow (2009-10), a Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at Stanford Humanities Center (2009-2010), a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow (2008), and a Radcliffe Institute fellow in 2012-2013.

Her current project is, Kenedougou Visions, a book about Malian balafonist Neba Solo.  Monson’s articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology, Critical Inquiry, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Black Music Research Journal, Women and Music, and several edited volumes. She began her career as a trumpet player.  She also plays piano and Senufo balafon.