Gray, Lila Ellen

Lila Ellen Gray joined the Columbia faculty in 2005. Her research interests include:  affect, gender, poetics, post-colonialism, performance, vocality, fado, urban cultural studies and the anthropology/ethnomusicology of Europe. Her book, Fado Resounding: Affective Politics and Urban Life (in press, Duke University Press), ethnographically examines the efficacies of musical genre in shaping affective subjects and imaginaries of history in the post-colonial metropole of Lisbon.  Fado Resounding is based on field research conducted during the first decade of the 2000s in multiple Lisbon sites: tourist and professional venues, museums and archives, the recording and world music industries, but it is primarily grounded in amateur fado performance practice in Lisbon clubs.  She is currently working on a theoretical project on sound and affect and on an ethnographic project which examines responses to the financial crisis in Portugal/Iberia in expressive culture. She has received fellowships from the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, the Social Science Research Council, the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, the Luso-American Foundation and the Council for European Studies. Her article "Fado's City" (2011), published in the journal Anthropology and Humanism, was awarded the Richard Waterman Junior Scholar Prize and the Jaap Kunst Prize from the Society of Ethnomusicology in 2012.