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Michael Figueroa

Michael Figueroa

Director, New Faculty Program

mfigueroa@unc.edu

Michael A. Figueroa (Associate Professor; he/him/his) specializes in music and politics in the SWANA region and its diasporas (South West Asia and North Africa, aka the “Middle East”). The early phase of his career focused on music in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, culminating in his first book, City of Song: Music and the Making of Modern Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2022). In the book, he develops a genealogical approach to the study of musical discourse, arguing that popular song has been an essential discursive site for the production of spatial knowledge about Jerusalem, the main contested territory within the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. One of the several publications stemming from this project, “‘Behind the Sounds’: Matti Caspi, Shlomo Gronich, and the Politics of Genre in Israel” (Journal of Musicology), was awarded the American Musicological Society Jewish Studies and Music Study Group Publication Award in 2022.

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