Jeff Packman

Biography

Jeff Packman is a Professor of Ethnomusicology who specializes in Brazilian music, popular music of the Americas, and cultural theory. His other scholarly interests include music and technoculture, music cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean, and Afrodiasporic performance. A former working drummer, much of his research emphasizes questions of race, social class, and cultural politics in relation to professional music making. With support from the J. William Fulbright Program and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, he has conducted extensive and ongoing fieldwork in Bahia, Brazil since 2002. This research has provided the basis for several book chapters in edited volumes and articles in scholarly journals including Latin American Music Review, Black Music Research Journal, Ethnomusicology, and Ethnomusicology Forum. Several of his more recent and forthcoming publications were developed while he was the 2009-2010 post-doctoral fellow at York University’s Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples. Presently, in addition to completing a book on professional musicians in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, Dr. Packman is co-leading an interdisciplinary collaborative study of samba de roda, an Afro-Diasporic music and dance complex from the same region that was recently recognized by UNESCO as a masterpiece of oral and intangible heritage. At the University of Toronto, Professor Packman teaches a variety of ethnomusicology and research theory and methods courses in the Faculty of Music’s History and Culture Division and Graduate Program in Performance, and he served as Associate Dean, Graduate Education, in the Faculty of Music.