Eric Schmidt

Eric J. Schmidt (he/him) researches how people remake social worlds through musical and sonic expression in northwest Africa's Sahel and Sahara regions. His interdisciplinary scholarship engages work in economic ethnomusicology, the anthropology of value, African studies, and media studies. Informed by ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Niger, Mali, and the United States, his research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, and the West African Research Association.

His book project examines shifting value regimes in the Tuareg music economy since the 1990s, a period when subversive guitar songs emerged as a crucial vehicle for mobilizing Tuareg rebellions in Mali and Niger. It considers how artists, fans, and cultural institutions manage the tensions between this political legacy and the new material possibilities afforded by Tuareg guitar's global popularity, attending to questions of precarity, intellectual property, caste, and media circulation.

Prior to joining Babson, he taught at Southern Methodist University and served as Assistant Director of the Boston University African Studies Center. He earned his PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).