Contact Information

grayl@dickinson.edu

Weiss Center for the Arts
717-254-8718

Bio

Lila Ellen Gray is an ethnomusicologist, cultural anthropologist, and interdisciplinary scholar of music and sound. Her research interests include: affect; urban ethnography; sound studies; ethnographic theory, method and poetics; celebrity; vocality; media circulation and public culture; Portugal; the Lusophone world; and Europe’s South. Her book, Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life (2013 Duke University Press), is a musical ethnography of fado, Portugal’s most celebrated musical genre, and was the recipient of the 2014 Woody Guthrie Award of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US). Her article "Fado's City" published in Anthropology and Humanism (2011), was awarded the Jaap Kunst Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology for the most significant article in the discipline in that year. Her present work concerns musical celebrity, amateur musicianship and mass tourism, and the labors of sound, heritage, and the senses in the context of multiple forms of precarity across Europe’s South. Publications include articles in the journals Ethnomusicology, History and Anthropology, and Culture, Theory and Critique. Her book, Amália at the Olympia, on the internationalization of the 20th century Portuguese fado diva Amália Rodrigues, was published in 2023 by Bloomsbury Academic Press as part of their 33 1/3 Europe series. Professor Gray holds a PhD in cultural anthropology (2005) and a MA in music (2000) from Duke University and a BA in humanities from New College of Florida (1993). She has previously taught at Columbia University and at the University of Amsterdam. Organizations that have supported her work include: The Bogliasco Foundation; The Social Science Research Council; The Council for European Studies; The Luso-American Foundation for Development; and the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. Her courses are informed by longstanding commitments to interdisciplinary scholarship and emphasize the role of sound and music in shaping socio-cultural life.

Education

• B.A., New College of Florida, 1993
• M.A., Duke University, 2000
• Ph.D., 2005