Wayne Marshall is the Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Ethnomusicology for 2007-09 and will be teaching courses through the Music and African/Afro-American Studies Departments. Specializing in the intersections between Caribbean and American popular music, he received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007. His dissertation entitled Routes, Rap, Reggae: Hearing the Histories of Hip-hop and Reggae Together examines the musical interplay between Jamaica and the US in the late twentieth century, following a particular set of melodic figures across several decades to illuminate the role that technology, migration, and mass media have played in the ongoing formation of hip-hop and reggae as (trans)national musics advancing an intertwined cultural politics of blackness.
Dr. Marshall's theoretical interests include race and nation; cosmopolitanism and postcolonialism; the role of media production, circulation, and consumption in articulating social formations; and the role digital technologies and public performance can play in music scholarship. He has published scholarly articles and reviews in Popular Music, Interventions, Callaloo, and The World of Music while writing for a broader audience via such outlets as XLR8R magazine and the Boston Phoenix as well as on his blog ( wayneandwax.com), from which a post on reggaeton was selected for the DaCapo Best Music Writing 2006 anthology. His most recent project, an anthology called Reading Reggaeton: Historical, Aesthetic and Critical Perspectives, co-edited with Raquel Z. Rivera and Deborah Pacini-Hernandez, will be published by Duke University Press in 2008.
