Margarethe Adams

Margarethe Adams is an Associate Professor in Critical Music Studies at Stony Brook University. Her research focuses on music, media, and popular culture in Central Asia, with ethnographic work in Kazakhstan, northwest China, and Mongolia. She explores temporality and politics in postsocialist celebrations, sound and music in religious practices, and intersections of race and music history in America. Her recent monograph Steppe Dreams: Time, Mediation, and Postsocialist Celebrations in Kazakhstan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) is a key contribution to the field.

Education:

• B.A. in Russian and Soviet Area Studies, Middlebury College
• M.M. and Ph.D. in Musicology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Adams teaches courses on race in American music history, gender and race in ethnography, and music's role in religion. She has organized the Sound & Secularity Symposium with colleague August Sheehy. Her work appears in The Yale Journal of Music & Religion, Collaborative Anthropologies, and The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture. She is affiliated with Stony Brook's History Department and Asian and Asian-American Studies program, developing courses on topics like Medieval Muslim Spain and Islam's rise.