Eric J. Schmidt

Eric J. Schmidt is the former Assistant Director of the African Studies Center at Boston University, where he also occasionally serves as Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Pardee School of Global Studies and the College of Fine Arts. He received his PhD in ethnomusicology from UCLA in 2018. His research engages with media circulation, cultural heritage, and value in the Sahel and Sahara regions of northwest Africa, with a particular focus on Tuareg music in Niger. His work has been supported by Fulbright, Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships, a Critical Language Scholarship, the Fowler Museum, and the UCLA Graduate Division. Eric has published articles, essays, and reviews in Ethnomusicology Forum, Ethnomusicology, African Studies Association News, the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, and Ethnomusicology Review, for which he served as a managing editor. In addition to his teaching and research, he is an advocate for international education programs and serves as Vice Chair of the Association of African Studies Programs. 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.