Dr Nomi Dave appointed to the Faculty of Music
Professor Nomi Dave
The Faculty of Music is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr Nomi Dave as Associate Professor, with a Tutorial Fellowship at St Catherine's College. She will join the Faculty at the start of Michaelmas Term 2025.
Dr Dave is currently Associate Professor of Music at the University of Virginia, where she also co-directs the Sound Justice Lab. An interdisciplinary researcher, she works across music / sound studies, law, and anthropology. Her work explores voice, sound, and listening in legal and extra-legal processes.
Dr Dave is currently working on two projects. The first is a collaborative project on sound, listening, and sexual justice in the Republic of Guinea. This work includes a documentary film, Big Mouth (dir. Bremen Donovan; in post-production), which Nomi is co-producing with filmmaker Bremen Donovan and journalist Moussa Yéro Bah. She is currently completing a book manuscript, Amplified Feminism, on testimony, voice, and listening in the production of evidence, in the courtroom and beyond. With Bremen, she is also leading a digitization project, funded through UCLA's Modern Endangered Archives Program, to preserve the collection of the oldest independent media outlet in Guinea, Le Lynx.
Her second project explores audio remote access to trials. The project analyses vocal practices, sound technologies, and ways of listening in and out of court, in relation to the principle of open justice. She is in the early stages of a book on this work and has a forthcoming article in Public Culture on audio access in trials against white supremacy and hate.
Dr Dave's first book, The Revolution's Echoes (University of Chicago Press, 2019), explores music and the aesthetics of authoritarianism. It analyses vocal practices of quietness and discretion in authoritarian and post-authoritarian Guinea, considering how musicians and audiences navigate between pleasure and state violence. This research was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (US). The book was awarded a Special Commendation from the Royal Anthropological Institute; and the Ruth Stone Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Born in London and raised between the UK and the US, Nomi is of East African Indian descent. Before entering academia, she trained as a lawyer and worked for five years for the United Nations, including as a refugee protection officer for the UN Refugee Agency in Guinea. She holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology and a DPhil in Music from the University of Oxford.
