Alejandro L. Madrid

I am a cultural theorist of sound and music working in Latin American and Latinx studies. I am currently Chair and Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at Cornell University’s Department of Music. I am a recipient of the Dent Medal, the Premio de Musicología Casa de las Américas, and awards from the ASCAP Foundation, the Latin American Studies Association, the American Musicological Society, and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. My larger intellectual project explores the intersection of nationalism and modernism in order to develop a critique of exceptionalism and a progressive and inclusive alternative to identity politics.

My current book project, “Beyond the Walls of the Sounded City,” focuses on sound archives and the transhistorical creation and circulation of knowledge in and about Latin America. By proposing the notion of the Sounded City, I challenge the celebratory tone of the aural turn in cultural studies and investigate how a concept such as the Lettered City, the enlightened elite essential in designing and implementing cultural and social projects throughout the history of Latin America, continues to carry cultural valence at the intersection of today’s neoliberal reconfiguration of society, the arts, and intellectual life in the region.