Eric Schmidt

Eric J. Schmidt is the former Assistant Director of the Boston University African Studies Center and received his PhD in ethnomusicology from UCLA in 2018. His research engages with questions of value, media circulation, and cultural heritage in northwest Africa, with a particular focus on Tuareg music. It draws on over fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Niger and support from Fulbright, the Fowler Museum, and a UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship. Eric has published essays and reviews in Ethnomusicology, the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, and Ethnomusicology Review, for which he previously served as a managing editor. Eric Schmidt is the recipient of the prestigious American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for a project titled “The Cultural Production of Displacement: Capitalist Reckonings in 21st Century Tuareg Music” and is currently an affiliated researcher at the African Studies Center.