James Q. Davies is Professor of Music, editor of the UChicago Press book series New Material Histories
of Music, and scholar with musicological interests and expertise in the long nineteenth century. He
authored the books Romantic Anatomies of Performance (California: 2014) and Creatures of the Air:
Music, Atlantic Spirits, Breath, 1817-1913 (Chicago: 2023). James grew up in Johannesburg, with first
degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand. He wrote his PhD at the University of Cambridge,
where he later received a Junior Research Fellowship (Caius), before moving to Berkeley.
What is it that we are making when we are making music? This question drives his historical work.
While he has an ostensibly Euro-colonial/Europeanist research background, he has also published on
music in Southern Africa, pre-colonial Gabon, and pre-colonial Cabinda. In view of modern ideas about
the human as a uniquely musical creature, his research encompasses political ecology, elemental
media theory, science and technology studies, climate-race discourse, and the ethics of humanitarian
and religious intervention in Africa.
James’s current work centers on twentieth-century ideas about African music, with three projects in
the early stages. The first is a book on the extractive (ethno)musicological search for the sonic origins
of the human and African counter-humanisms at the so-called “Cradle of Humankind,” in apartheid-era
West Rand Goldfields. A second longer-term and collaborative project, The Invention of African Music,
accounts for the struggle over knowledge production in the area of study called “African Music.” The
project maps this epistemic field by exposing the provenance of a considerable volume of materials,
collected for the 1947 Ogooué-Congo Mission (Paris, France), the archive of the International Library
of African Music (Makhanda, South Africa), the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv (Berlin, Germany), and
the J. H. Kwabena Nketia Archive (Accra, Ghana). A third project will collect some of his previously-
published essays into a monograph on “melocolonialism,” that is, on the sonic mediation of colonial
experience as nineteenth-century melodrama.
Davies' research interests include cultural performance, singers and voice, keyboard practice, anthropologies of listening, colonial melodrama, history of science, 19th-century physiology and sciences of the mind. He has published on such topics as colonial melodrama, diva-concepts, aging castrati, musical gift albums, histories of pianistic touch, township opera and danced Beethoven symphonies.