Ingrid Monson

Ingrid Monson is Quincy Research Jones Professor of African American music at Harvard University.  She has twice served as chair of the Department of Music (2005-2008; 2019-2022), and as Interim Dean of Arts and Humanities at Harvard (2010-2011). 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 book The Voice of Kenedougou: Neba Solo and Senufo Musical Sensibility in Mali, is forthcoming on Oxford University Press. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020, she has also 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.  Monson’s articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology, Critical Inquiry, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Black Music Research Journal, Women and Music, The Black Scholar and several edited volumes. She began her career as a trumpet player.