Richard Jankowsky

Richard C. Jankowsky earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and is Professor of Music at Tufts. An anthropologist of music specializing in trance and ritual in North Africa, he focuses on music's capacity to heal, to maintain and narrate histories of minoritized populations, to create conditions for transcendent experiences, and to serve as a flashpoint for debates over cultural, religious, and political identities. He received the Alan Merriam Book Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology for his monograph Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form (2021), which was also a Finalist for the American Academy of Religion Book Prize on Religion and the Arts and received Honorable Mention for the L. Carl Brown Book Prize from the American Institute for Maghreb Studies. His previous book, Stambeli: Music, Trance, and Alterity in Tunisia (2010), also received recognition for awards in African Music, Anthropology, and North African Studies. A two-time National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, he has published on topics including music and ritual, methodologies for researching music and trance, rhythmic analysis in trance musics, the politics of staging Sufi music, and jazz diplomacy and the democratic imagination.