Bertie Kibreah
Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology
Email: bkibreah@usf.edu
Phone: (813) 974-2311
Office: MUS 365
Bertie Kibreah joined USF鈥檚 Music Faculty in 2022. He is an ethnomusicologist and
South Asianist (PhD, University of Chicago), with interests in re-sounding the greater
region of Bengal鈥攁n enduring focal point in South Asia鈥攖o be more inclusive of sonic
histories and contemporary music life in Bangladesh, the Bay of Bengal, and the 鈥淏anglashere.鈥�
Bertie鈥檚 research is shaped by discourses of devotion, modernity, and migration鈥攅specially
through the performative lens of pilgrimage, cultural industries, Sufi feminisms,
and borderland musicking. He frequently draw on theories of difference (memory, partition,
genocide studies), interconnectivity (Inter-Asian, Indian Ocean, Adivasi, and Asian
American studies) as well as orality-aurality (sound studies, affect studies, the
anthropology of media).
Bertie鈥檚 current book project explores and complicates trajectories of devotion through
sonic geographies of the Bengal river delta, the musical placemaking of shrines, and
the collectivized impressions of folk festivals within, between, and beyond Bengals
(including adjacent Bengali pluralities). A second book project of his is concerned
with intergenerational timbres and devotional memory in the larger realm of Bangladeshi
global citizenries, as refracted by recent labor reforms in the Arab Gulf, newer migration
routes into Europe via the Mediterranean, and the often overlooked 鈥渆thnoburbs鈥� of
Bangladeshi Americans.
Trained on the tabla, a prominent percussion instrument in South Asia, Bertie also
sings in a variety of languages and performs on a number of additional instruments鈥攅specially
from Bengal鈥攊ncluding the dotara lute. The breath of his musical explorations鈥攁cross
linguistic and sonic borders鈥攊s fueled by the civic awareness of public humanities
work and the artistic interactions of practitioners and communities.
Bertie is the recipient of a number of awards, most recently a research grant from
USF College of Design, Art & Performance, the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Research
Award (administered through the Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at
UC Berkeley), and the McKnight Junior Faculty Research Fellowship through the Florida
Education Fund. Bertie is also president of the Southeast/Caribbean chapter of the
Society for Ethnomusicology.