Sidra Lawrence is a percussionist and a professor of ethnomusicology at Bowling Green State University. She received a PhD in Ethnomusicology and a doctoral portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She was also a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. Her work utilizes an intersectional approach to address the ways that race, gender, and sexuality shape meaning in the music and soundworlds of Africa and the African diasporas. Her book manuscript, Everyday Solidarities: African Feminism and Sonic Intimacy, (forthcoming) based on ethnographic research in Ghana and Burkina Faso, explores sonic performativity as a mode of articulating an indigenous feminist politics. Her most recent work explores the relationships between trauma, audibility, and justice.
Lawrence was a co-editor and contributing author of the edited volume, intimate entanglements in the ethnography of performance: race, gender, vulnerability (Rochester University Press 2023), which won honorable mention for the Society for Ethnomusicology Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize. She has publications in Feminist Studies, Ethnomusicology,African Music, Africa Today, The Senses and Society, and The Latin American Music Review. She also has a chapter included in Ethnopornography: Sexuality, Colonialism, and Archival Knowledge (Duke University Press 2020). Her work has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the West African Research Association, and Bowling Green State University’s Institute for the Study of Culture and Society. Her research on African feminism and women musicians in Ghana was awarded the Wong Tolbert Prize and African Music Section Student Paper Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Section on the Status of Women and African Music Section, respectively. She was also awarded the Marcia Herndon Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Gender and Sexualities Studies Section for her co-authored publication addressing ethnomusicological methods and the #metoo movement.
