Faculty Profile: Marié Abe
Position: Assistant Professor of Music (Musicology and Ethnomusicology)
Marié Abe holds an MA and a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a degree in sociology, anthropology, and ethnomusicology from Swathmore College. She is an active performer of the accordion and piano, with frequent concert tours and collaborations with recording artists from the United States and Japan. Her scholarship explores politics of space and sound, critical cultural theory, and Japanese popular performing arts. Other research interests include cultural advocacy, ritual music in Bali and Thailand, the global circulation of tango, and afro-futurism in the United States.
Before coming to Boston University, Prof. Abe taught in the Department of Music and Asian Studies Program at UC Berkeley, and in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, where she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies.
She is currently working on a book-length ethnographic analysis of chindon-ya, a live musical advertisement practice in Japan. She is also a co-producer of the NPR radio documentary “Squeezebox Stories” (premiered in Fall 2011), which tells stories from Californian immigration history using the accordion as a common trope.
