Speaker: Janie Cole (University of Cape Town)

Topic: "Music, African Agency, and Foreign Entanglements in the Christian Kingdom of 16th‐Century Ethiopia”

Dr. Janie Cole (Ph.D. University of London) is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Town’s College of Music, Research Officer for East Africa on UCT’s Mellon project “Re-Centring AfroAsia,” and a Research Associate at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Her research encompasses a broad range of subjects with a strong focus on interdisciplinarity, source studies and global music histories, including on musical practices, instruments and thought in early modern African kingdoms and Afro-Eurasian encounters, transcultural circulation and entanglements in the age of exploration; the intersection of music, consumption and production, politics, patronage and gender in late Renaissance and early Baroque Italy and France; and the convergence of music, trauma, resistance, incarceration, violence, and social change in 20th-century apartheid South Africa.

Her current work focuses on early modern musical culture at the royal court in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and intertwined sonic histories of entanglement with the Latin Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean world. Her publications include two monographs and numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters. She has been granted fellowships from The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti, the Newberry Library, the Medici Archive Project, won research grants from The Getty Foundation, The Leverhulme Trust, and The Italian Cultural Institute, and been awarded the Stephen Arlen Award from English National Opera, the Janet Levy Prize from the American Musicological Society, the Author Grant Award from the Academic and Non-Fiction Authors Association of South Africa, and most recently the Claude V. Palisca Fellowship Award in Musicology from the Renaissance Society of America.

She served as Council Member of the Renaissance Society of America as Discipline Representative in Music (2015-17) and is currently the founding Discipline Representative in Africana Studies (2018-22) at RSA and on the Editorial Advisory Board of Renaissance Quarterly. She is the co-founder of the international Study Group “Early African Sound Worlds” and the founder of the Kukutana Ensemble. which develops musical performances rooted in indigenous East African music and its historical links to a pre-colonial Indian Ocean World sound- and visualscapes. She is building the Malibongwe Women’s Archive of women’s struggle testimonies and music from apartheid prisons in collaboration with University of Cape Town Libraries Special Collections funded by the Schlettwein Foundation. She is the Founder/Executive Director of Music Beyond Borders, a platform for public musicology, engaged scholarship and innovative digital humanities projects.

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