Eric Schmidt

Eric J. Schmidt (he/him) researches how people remake social worlds through music and sound, focusing on the entanglements of postcolonial and transnational politics with the music industry in northwest Africa's Sahel and Sahara regions. Informed by ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Niger, Mali, and the United States, his interdisciplinary scholarship engages work in economic ethnomusicology, legal anthropology and the anthropology of value, African studies, and media studies.

His current book project examines shifting value regimes in the Tuareg music economy since the 1990s, a period when subversive guitar songs emerged as a crucial vehicle for mobilizing Tuareg rebellions in Mali and Niger. It considers how artists, fans, and cultural institutions manage the tensions between this political legacy and the new material possibilities afforded by Tuareg guitar's global popularity, attending to questions about precarity, intellectual property, caste, and media circulation.

Schmidt's research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, and the West African Research Association. Prior to joining Babson, he taught at Southern Methodist University and served as Assistant Director of the Boston University African Studies Center. In addition to his teaching and research, he is Co-Chair of the African and African Diasporic Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He earned his PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).