Liliana Carrizo
Assistant Professor
Liliana Carrizo is an ethnomusicologist whose work focuses broadly on music and migration across numerous transregional contexts. She joins 华体会 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the humanities at Harvard University, while also serving as a Faculty Affiliate at the Immigration Initiative at Harvard (IIH). Her current book project examines biographical songs of migration and cultural exile among Iraqi Jews. Based on two and half years of ethnographic and archival research, her work considers how interreligious soundscapes associated with Arab, Jewish, and Muslim modal practices converge with biographical, edible, and sonic memories among Iraqi immigrants, wherein singers access powerful, multi-sensorial memories that are crucial to their self-conceptions in the present day.
Inspired by her background as a child of Iraqi immigrants raised in New Mexico, Carrizo’s next research project will focus on the music of Arab and Jewish immigrants within the wider regional fabric of the American Southwest.
Carrizo received her PhD and MM in Ethnomusicology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and holds a BA in Music from Williams College. Her master’s research was based on fieldwork conducted in central Mongolia, where she became a performer of the Mongolian limbe (flute) under the tutelage of the master urtin duu Mongolian long song singer, G. Dad’suren of Dundgovi provicne. During this time, she also helped establish a music school for Mongolian long song in Dad’suren’s name. In 2013, she co-founded and produced the MusicArte festival in Panama City, Panamá – a biannual international festival of contemporary Latin American music.
An accomplished flautist and pianist, Carrizo has worked as a professional dance musician and accompanist with a number of international and university-based companies and programs, including the University of Illinois, Columbia College Chicago, Cie Gilles Jobin (Switzerland), Casina Settarte (Italy), Delfos Danza Contemporánea (Mexico), and the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Her interdisciplinary work has been supported by awards and fellowships from the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the Fulbright program, The Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TARII), the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the University of Illinois Distinguished Fellowship Program, the Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Program, the Gendell and Shiner Family Foundation, and the Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) program, among others.
As an educator, Carrizo teaches a range of courses in ethnomusicology that incorporate performative and experiential learning modules with ethnographic research and methodology. Through immersive exercises in aural perception and sensorial awareness, she encourages students to reflect on the nature of power, social hierarchy, and sociocultural meaning as embodied and transformed through music and sound.
Courses (selection):
- Music, the Supernatural, and Otherworldly Realms
- Musical Lives of Song and Migration
- Musical Tapestries of the American Southwest
- Worlds of Musical Meaning
