Brendan Kibbee

Appointed Fall 2024

Brendan Kibbee is a scholar-teacher whose work focuses on intersections between music, politics and urban life. Using approaches rooted in ethnography, performance and urban geography, he has worked extensively with civic and religious associations on the streets of Dakar, Senegal. During frequent, late-night, large-scale, street assemblies, these associations reorganize urban space around dance, music and religious poetry recitation, in the process, shaping the trajectories of many urban lives and livelihoods. Ultimately, this research reconsiders relations between African music and politics in light of the continent’s rapid urbanization. His work has been published in African Studies Review, Current Musicology and Musicology Research, and the edited volumes The Palgrave Handbook for Islam in Africa, and Sonic Signatures: Music, Migration, and the City at Night.

Dr. Kibbee completed his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the City University of New York in 2022. Before joining University of Maryland, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University. Along with Dr. Ousseina Alidou, he launched a new course on Global Hip Hop at Rutgers, organized a concert of Hip Hop artists representing the South Asian, Senegalese and Cape Verdean diasporas, and convened a one-day symposium/workshop on “Global Hip Hop and Civics Education” which brought together over twenty artists, activists, educators, students and researchers.

In his pedagogy, Kibbee emphasizes working collectively and poetically, giving students multiple creative paths to shape their own learning experience. He elicits practices like storytelling, poetry, and beat-making in class, while selecting course materials that draw on multiple writing styles and literacies. In 2022, he won a grant from Boston University’s African Studies Center to develop a music technology course that centers African and diasporic perspectives. While engaging students in technical aspects of music production, he also shows how music technology continually reshapes critical understandings of identities, diasporas, freedoms, and futures.