The Faculty of Music are delighted to announce that Dr Stephen Wilford and Dr Vanessa Paloma Duncan Elbaz will join the Faculty in Michaelmas 2018 as Research Associates on the ERC-funded project Past and Present Musical Encounters across the Strait of Gibraltar, led by Dr Matthew Machin-Autenrieth.
Dr Wilford, who specialises in North African Andalusian music and Algerian diaspora communities in France and the UK, joins Cambridge following teaching positions at City, University of London, Goldsmiths, University of London and the University of Southampton. At Cambridge, Dr Wilford will be examining the institutionalisation of Arab-Andalusian music and its dialogues with Western Art Music, both in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Dr Paloma Elbaz, whose research focuses on Jewish Andalusian music in Morocco, recently completed a PhD at the Université Sorbonne Paris Cité following an international performance career. She is also founder and director of KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive. Her research for the project will explore how the Jewish Andalusian musical legacy has been coopted by others (most notably in Morocco and Spain) for different social and political agendas.