Ethnomusicology
davindarsingh@g.harvard.edu
“Cultures of Cargo: Trucking, Musical Media, and the Logistics of Punjabi Mobility”
Davindar Singh is a Presidential Scholar and PhD candidate in ethnomusicology with a secondary field in anthropology. His dissertation project traces how changes in Punjabi popular media, and parallel changes in South Asian logistics industries, emerge from a transnational history of violent resource extraction. This history looms large in contemporary political conflict in Punjab and is constituted in public culture through popular music, political oratory, sports poetry, and everyday discourse about the spatialized motion of value in the making of post-Liberalization India’s political economy. He is co-chair of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Sound Studies Section, holds an M.Mus from New England Conservatory and a B. Mus from Berklee College of Music, and used to be a saxophonist.