Jonathan Glasser

Background

My work focuses on questions of patrimony, memory, expressive culture, and social difference in early modern and 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. I am also developing new projects about language ideological debates around Judeo-Arabic and about struggles over the meaning and uses of evolution 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

 Judeo-Arabic Love Poems from the Western Mediterranean, William & Mary Libraries, September 2024, https://libraries.wm.edu/judeoarabiclovepoems

Inalienability as Reciprocity: An Essay on Kinship. Proceedings of the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, 21 (2024). 

Decentering the Colonial in Ghaouti Bouali’s Kashf al-qinā‘ of 1904. Turath 2(2023): 36-68. Special Issue on Musicology in/of the Maghrib in the Colonial Context: Revisiting Jules Rouanet, edited by Jonathan Glasser and Ahmed Amine Dellaï.

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.

Beyond the Borrowing Paradigm: Lessons from the Muslim-Jewish Maghrib. In Music and Encounter at the Mediterranean Crossroads: A Sea of Voices, ed. Ruth F. Davis and Brian Oberlander. Routledge, 2021.

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. 

The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
 
Andalusi Musical Origins at the Moroccan-Algerian Frontier: Beyond Charter Myth. American Ethnologist 42(4) 2015: 720-733.