Gavin Steingo

Gavin Steingo is an Associate Professor of Music at Princeton University, where he also serves on the Executive Committee for the Program in African Studies. He received his PhD in the Anthropology of Music from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 and was previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University (2010–2012). Steingo is the author of Kwaito’s Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), which was awarded the Alan P. Merriam prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is co-editor of Remapping Sound Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019) and of the book series “Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound” (Oxford University Press). Steingo’s current research focuses on the way that sound and music have been deployed in the historical construction of the Human as an ontological category. At the MPIWG, he will be working on a book project (currently under contract with The University of Chicago Press), tentatively titled “Between Worlds: Music, Sound, and Interspecies Communication.”