Elizabeth Matsushita, Ph.D.

Liz Matsushita is a cultural and intellectual historian of the modern Middle East and North Africa. Her research areas include empire and colonialism, nationalism and state-building, the politics of knowledge production, and race and racialization, with a special focus on music as a site of power and contestation in the colonial and post-colonial encounter. Her work aims to bridge disciplinary gaps between history, ethno/musicology, and anthropology and employs musical methodologies including sound studies and sheet music analysis. Her first book project, The Faces of North African Music: Race, Colonialism, and Scholarship in the Maghrib, examines the politics of musicology and musical preservation in colonial Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, the ways that music fundamentally supported and shaped colonialist and nationalist projects, and how ethnic genre-ification of North African musics played a significant role in the racialization of the population.

At CMC, she will be teaching history courses on the early Islamic world and on anti-colonial revolutions in North Africa, as well as an FHS course on music, politics, and identity in the Middle East and North Africa.