B.A. St. John's College, Santa Fe, NM (2004)
M.A. in Eastern Classics, St. John's College, Santa Fe, NM (2007)
Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology, University of Pennsylvania (2014)
Christine Dang
Assistant Professor
Music in relation to: citizenship; ethnic, racial, and spiritual diasporas; Islam and Christianity in the Global South; civil conflict; West Africa; urban America; Vietnam
Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities, Stanford University, 2014 (declined); Harper-Schmidt Fellowship, Society of Fellows, University of Chicago, 2014 (declined); Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, 2014 (declined); GAPSA-Provost Award for Interdisciplinary Innovation, University of Pennsylvania, 2013; Penfield Dissertation Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania, 2012-2013; Foreign Language and Area Studies Dissertation Research Fellowship in Wolof, 2011-2012; Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship in Arabic, 2010-2011
"Pilgrimage Through Poetry: Sung Journeys Within the Murid Spiritual Diaspora." Islamic Africa 4, no. 1 (2013): 69-101.
Faculty Bio:
Christine Dang's research explores musical performance at the intersection of religion and politics - with emphasis on the music of West Africa, Islam and Christianity in the Global South, and religious identity in urban America. Her dissertation, "Songs of Spiritual Citizenship: Muslim and Christian Voices in the Senegalese Public Sphere," represents the first full-length study of sacred music in Senegal. Based on nearly two years of ethnography and analysis of sources in Arabic, Wolof, Joola, and French, her dissertation examined the musical tactics used by Muslim majority and Christian minority populations to stake claim on public spaces and to influence political debates of the Senegalese public sphere.
Professor Dang is currently working on interrelated projects that investigate the role of sacred music in forming political communities within several West African contexts. She is also leading a community-based film-making project, "Teach for Allah: American Citizenship and Islamic Education in West Philadelphia," for which she received the University of Pennsylvania Provost Award for Interdisciplinary Innovation. Her research has appeared in Islamic Africa, and she has presented papers at national conferences of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, and the African Studies Association.