Jonathan Glasser
Associate Professor
Office:
Washington Hall 122
Phone:
757-221-1058
Email:
[[jglasser]]
Areas of specialization:
History of anthropological theory, music, poetics, exchange, Muslim-Jewish relations, Arabic, North Africa and the Middle East
Background
I am a historical anthropologist whose work focuses on questions of patrimony, memory, 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 the dynamics of revival and transmission in an urban performance practice in northwestern Algeria and eastern Morocco. I am currently finishing a book about Muslim-Jewish interactions around music and poetry in Algeria and its diaspora in the early modern and modern periods. I am also developing a new project about the fate of evolutionary concepts in anthropological thought. I regularly teach courses on sociocultural theory, North Africa and the Middle East, language, and Muslim-Jewish relations.
Education
PhD University of Michigan 2008
Selected Publications
The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
“Le concert « algérien » de l’Exposition universelle de Paris de 1889 et la naissance de la scène de la musique arabe.” In Juifs et Musulmans en France. De l’Empire à l’Hexagone (1860 à nos jours). Edited by Benjamin Stora, Karima Dirèche et Mathias Dreyfuss. Paris: Seuil, 2022.
Patrimony as Inalienability in Nineteenth-Century Algeria: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Destroying and the Promise of Comparison. Hésperis-Tamuda, LV (4) (2020): 69-99.
A Case for "Jewish-Muslim Relations,” Jewish-Muslim Research Network, September 3, 2020
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.
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) 2015: 720-733.
