
Jonathan Glasser
Associate Professor
Office:
Washington Hall 122
Phone:
757-221-1058
Email:
[[jglasser]]
Areas of specialization:
Exchange, historical anthropology, music, poetics and performance, colonialism, textuality, culture theory; North Africa and the Middle East
Background
I am a historical anthropologist whose work thus far has focused on questions of patrimony, expressive culture, and social difference in modern North Africa, with particular attention to Algeria and Morocco. My first book, The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2016) explored questions of revival and transmission in an urban performance practice in northwestern Algeria and eastern Morocco. My current project looks at Muslim-Jewish interactions around music and poetry in Algeria and its diaspora in the early modern and modern periods. An active performer in the William and Mary Middle Eastern Music Ensemble, I also regularly teach courses on anthropological theory, cultural anthropology, anthropological approaches to the study of Islam, textuality, and Muslim-Jewish relations in North Africa.
Education
PhD University of Michigan 2008Selected Publications
The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Patrimony as Inalienability in Nineteenth-Century Algeria: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Destroying and Promise of Comparison. Hésperis-Tamuda, LV (4) (2020): 69-99.
More Than Friends: On Muslim-Jewish Musical Intimacy in Algeria and Beyond. In Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures Between North Africa and France. Edited by Samuel Sami Everett and Rebekah Vince. Pp. 43-60. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020. https://cdn.shopify.com/s/
Interpretative Anthropology. International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., 2018.
Special Issue Introduction: Inhabiting the Margins: Middle Eastern Minorities Revisited. Co-authored with Guldem Büyüksaraç. Anthropological Quarterly 90(1) 2017: 5-16.
Andalusi Musical Origins at the Moroccan-Algerian Frontier: Beyond Charter Myth. American Ethnologist 42(4), November 2015.
A Case for "Jewish-Muslim Relations,” Jewish-Muslim Research Network, September 3, 2020, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/jmrn/a-case-for-jewish-muslim-relations/