Research Associate
Bio
Sophie is an anthropologist of music, with a focus on Egypt, and is a Research Associate (Ethnographies of MENA Region Musics) on the ‘Beyond 1932’ project. She holds an undergraduate degree in Music (KCL), a MPhil in Modern Middle East Studies with Arabic (Oxford), and a DPhil in Anthropology (Oxford). From 2022-2024 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Centre for Economic, Legal, and Social Studies and Documentation (CEDEJ) in Cairo.
Sophie is also active as a violinist in the UK and Egypt.
Research
Sophie’s research focuses on popular music in Egypt, with a particular interest in issues of social class, urban space, emotion/affect, and labour. She is currently working on a book about Egyptian shaʿbi music, a style that emerged from working-class neighbourhoods in the late 1960s and remains ubiquitous today. Based on ethnographic research with musicians in Cairo, including a year spent working as a violinist with various bands on the shaʿbi scene, the book explores how shaʿbi music is central means through which musicians and listeners navigate the city and construct a sense of their place within it, and through which they negotiate their class-cultural positions. It considers how shaʿbi has shifted on the spectrum of taste, and how its performers are engaged in contradictory entanglements with state power. Her new research as part of the ‘Beyond 1932’ project extends in several directions. She intends explore in more depth the historical dimensions of shaʿbi / popular / folkloric music in Egypt, considering how today’s shaʿbi is marked by the cultural politics of earlier decades. She is also interested in music-making in urban and semi-urban centres outside of Cairo, in the context of rural/urban transformations, as well as informal modes of musical learning.