Michael A. Figueroa

Associate Professor (Ethnomusicology), Associate Chair for Academic Studies

Michael A. Figueroa (Associate Professor; he/him/his) conducts research in the SWANA region and its diasporas (South West Asia and North Africa, aka the “Middle East”), with a focus on connections between performance, literature, politics, race, and religion. He currently serves as Associate Chair for Academic Studies in the Department of Music and as Director of the New Faculty Program at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. 

The early phase of Figueroa’s career focused on music in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, culminating in City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2022), a critical history of Zionist musical discourse about the contested city of Jerusalem. A notable contribution of the book is Figueroa’s championing of mixed musicological methodologies combining ethnographic, historical, and analytical modes of inquiry under the rubric of genealogy, with a particular attention to how music is embedded in non-musical aesthetic practice—chiefly poetry, film, dance, and theater—and in political ideology itself. 

At present, he is completing work on an ethnographic manuscript, “Racial Awakening in Arab America: Performance, Intimacy, and Self-Critique,” a study of contemporary Arab popular and experimental performance practice in multiple US cities (Chicago, Detroit, Durham, New York, Oakland, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC). He is also working on a critical essay concerning improvisation Edward Said’s uses of musical metaphors and maintains other interests and publication plans related to the study of music in Muslim Iberia, especially during the early Abbasid period (ca. 750–861 CE). To this end, beginning in Fall 2024 he will convene a Black Mediterranean study group with the support of a Dorothy F. Wiley Grant from the UNC Medieval and Early Modern Studies Program. All prospective participants are welcome to inquire. 

Figueroa has published in several journals, including Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Journal of Musicology, and multiple edited volumes, including one for which he served as an editor: Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma (University of Michigan Press, “Music and Social Justice” series, 2020, with Annegret Fauser). His article “‘Behind the Sounds’: Matti Caspi, Shlomo Gronich, and the Politics of Genre in Israel” (Journal of Musicology), was awarded the American Musicological Society Jewish Studies and Music Study Group Publication Award in 2022. 

Figueroa serves on both Council and the Committee on the History of the Society for the American Musicological Society (AMS) and previously served as Co-Chair of the AMS Committee on Cultural Diversity. He is also highly active in the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), having previously served as Chair of the Alan Merriam Prize Committee and as President of the SEM’s special interest groups for Jewish Music and the Study of Music and Violence. On campus, he is a past Associate Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies and Coordinator of the Faculty of Color and Indigenous Faculty Group at the Institute for Arts and Humanities, and he maintains an active presence in the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies. Beginning in Fall 2024, he will take up the role of Director of New Faculty Programs at the IAH.

Prior to arriving at UNC, Figueroa earned a BA in Musicology from Northwestern University (2006) and a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago (2014).