Ingrid Monson

Ingrid Monson is Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music at Harvard University, where she holds a joint appointment in the departments of Music and African and African American Studies. She is a noted jazz scholar and ethnomusicologist with a life long interest in the relationships among music, race, aesthetics and politics.  Her most recent book Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Calls Out to Jazz and Africa addresses these issues in the jazz world of the 1950s and 1960s.  Monson is also author of Saying Something, which addresses the interactive and communal dimensions of jazz improvisation as a musical process.  She has been awarded many honors including most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, and a Stanford Humanities Center fellowship. She is currently working on a book about virtuosic Malian balafonist Neba Solo, entitled Kenedougou Visions and a series of essays on aesthetics and the body.