Frank Gunderson

Frank Gunderson is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Florida State University, and Coordinator of the FSU Musicology area. He received a B.A. from the Evergreen State College (WA), and an M.A. in World Music and Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University (CT). He has taught at Ohio University and the University of Michigan, and spent two years teaching in a village secondary school in Kenya. He is an active member of the African Studies Association and the Society for Ethnomusicology, and is currently Film Review Editor for the SEM journal Ethnomusicology. He has published articles and reviews in Ethnomusicology, Africa Today, History and Anthropology, and African Music, and has twice been a guest editor of the journal The World of Music. He is a former music director of KAOS radio in Olympia WA, where he was involved with the NW independent music scene. It was here that he worked with "outsider" musician Travis Roberts, work recently culminating in a film co-directed with Bret Woods, The Human Skab (2012). He has conducted extensive fieldwork in East Africa, and has produced the CD Tanzania: Farmer Composers of North West Tanzania (1997, Multicultural Media), and co-edited with Gregory Barz the book Mashindano!: Competitive Music Performance in East Africa (2000, Mkuki na Nyota Press/African Books Collective LTD, Michigan State University Press). His most recent book “We Never Sleep We Dream of Farming”: Sukuma Labor Songs from Western Tanzania (Brill Academic Press, 2010) was the 2009-2011 winner of the Kwabena Nketia Book Award for best monograph on African music. He is currently working on a book about the social history of rhumba in Tanzania, focusing on the lives and creative work of Hassan Rehani Bitchuka and Muhidin Maalim Gurumo. His research interests include musical repatriation, historical methodology, documentary film, and music and human rights.