Specialties

Politics & Aesthetics, Ethnomusicology and Anthropology of Music & Sound, Human Rights, West Africa

Biography

Nomi Dave is an interdisciplinary researcher working across music and sound studies, law, and anthropology. Her work explores the relationship between voice, sound, violence, and claims for justice. She is a co-director of the Sound Justice Lab and is currently working on two collaborative research projects. The first involves an experimental film project (co-produced with Bremen Donovan) and book on sound, media, and responses to sexual violence in Guinea, emerging from a collaboration with the journalist Moussa Yéro Bah and a broader Guinean feminist collective. The second project is an exploration of the history and practices of audio livestreaming of court proceedings in the US.

Nomi is the author of The Revolution’s Echoes: Music, Politics, and Pleasure in Guinea (2019, University of Chicago Press), which considers how authoritarianism becomes meaningful for ordinary people. Through a study of voice and quietness in Guinea, the book explores why musicians and their audiences might choose to support an authoritarian state. It was awarded the Ruth Stone Prize in 2020 for most distinguished first monograph in ethnomusicology.

She received her PhD from Oxford University and previously taught at Duke University, in the departments of Cultural Anthropology and Music. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. She is a former lawyer and has worked in the fields of women’s rights, refugee rights, and immigration law, in Guinea and the US.