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Advisory Board

Prof. Rachel Beckles Willson (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Rachel Beckles Willson is a writer and musician who works at the intersections of composition, performance, history and politics. Her research has centered on 19th to 21st-century Hungary, Palestine and, most recently, Sicily; she has published three monographs as well as specialist articles in the sub-disciplines of analysis, historical musicology and ethnomusicology. Rachel is recipient of numerous substantial research grants from the AHRC, the British Council, the British Academy, the Humboldt Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust. She was Director of the Humanities and Arts Research Centre 2013-2016.

Prof. Manuela Cortés García, (Universidad de Granada)

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Manuela Cortés García is an Arabist, musicologist and translator, based at the Department of History and Science of Music at the Universidad de Granada. Previously, she has held appointments at the University of Cairo, the Instituto Cervantes in Baghdad and Cairo. She received her doctorate in Arab and Islamic philology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (1996) and Masters degrees in Arab and Hebrew culture and Musical Heritage from the Universidad de Granada. She is a member of the Network of Experts in Heritage; the Technical Commission of the Alcazaba (Almeria, 2001–2007) and the Scientific Commission for the Masters in Musical Heritage (at the Universidad de Granada), as well as a member of the editorial board for four musical journals. She has published six books in musicology, as well as being editor of three books and translator for four collections of Arabic poems. She has published 86 articles in music and literature. She regularly participates in national and international conferences.

Dr Ruth F. Davis, BMus (King's College London), PhD (Princeton)

Ruth Davis is an ethnomusicologist with special interest in music cultures of North Africa, the Middle East, and 

the wider Mediterranean. She is a Life Fellow and formerly Director of Studies in Music at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, where she is Emeritus Reader in Ethnomusicology. Her publications include Ma’luf. Reflections on the Arab Andalusian Music of Tunisia (Scarecrow Press, 2004); Robert Lachmann, The Oriental Music Broadcasts, 1936–1937: A Musical Ethnography of Mandatory Palestine (critical edition with 2-CD set of digitally restored recordings, A-R Editions, 2013); the edited volume Musical Exodus: Al-Andalus and its Jewish Diasporas (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); Music and Encounter at the Mediterranean Crossroads: A Sea of Voices, co-edited with Brian Oberlander (Routledge, 2021) and some fifty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She chairs the ICTM Study Group on Mediterranean Music Studies and is Music Section editor for Encyclopaedia of Islam Three.

Prof. Dwight Reynolds, PhD (Univ. Pennsylvania)

Dwight Reynolds received his Ph.D. from the Department of Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. His areas of academic interest are Arabic language and literature, autobiographies, performance studies, oral and musical traditions of the Middle East and ethnographic fieldwork. His publications include Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition(Cornell UP, 1995), Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (UC Press, 2001), and Arab Folklore: A Handbook (Greenwood Press, 2007).

Prof. Jonathan H. Shannon, B.A. (Stanford), PhD (CUNY)

Jonathan Shannon is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in aesthetics, musical performance, and cultural politics in the Arab world and Mediterranean. He has conducted ethnographic field research in Syria, Morocco, Spain, and France and is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including from SSRC, Fulbright-Hays. Professor Shannon was a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2008-2009. He has been teaching at Hunter College since 2001.

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