Lyndsey Hoh Copeland

Lyndsey Hoh Copeland is Assistant Professor of Music and Culture with a cross-appointment at the Institute of African Studies. Her research and teaching areas include African popular music, racialized listening and aesthetics, sound and the environment, sound and disability, virtual performance genres, and community-engaged scholarship.

Prof. Copeland’s articles on amateur brass band performance in the Republic of Benin, West Africa are published in the journals Ethnomusicology Forum (2018) and Africa (2019), and she is completing a book on that topic. Her other publications concern essentialist tropes in discourse on African music and dance: an article on the metaphor of hotness in African Music (2021) and a book chapter on the topic of sweat (co-authored with Prof. Gavin Steingo, forthcoming with Routledge). Prof. Copeland’s recent writing includes an article on the simulation of buzzing honeybees in public sound installations in Sound Studies (2023) and an article investigating how voice artists produce the feeling of touch in audio pornography (in preparation).

Prof. Copeland is the recipient of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2023–2025) for a multi-sited, ethnographic, and community-based research project titled “Sounding Indigenous in South Africa: Music and Performance Heritage in Khoisan Revival”. This project brings together Khoisan community members and activists with researchers and students from Nelson Mandela University (South Africa), Rhodes University (South Africa), and Carleton University (Canada) to collaboratively investigate and archive the performance practices of people in the Cape region who identify as Khoisan and are known as the “first people”. The project’s anticipated outcomes—including open-access writing and a digitized performance archive—will proffer materials for Khoisan communities to use in their cultural conservation and political mobilization efforts.

Prof. Copeland is the winner of the 2020 Early Career Prize awarded by the British Forum of Ethnomusicology and invited keynote speaker for the 2022 BFE/RMA conference. In fall 2022 she was appointed Sound Reviews editor for the interdisciplinary journal Sound Studies. Prior to joining Carleton University, Prof. Copeland was Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto, a lecturer in Stanford University’s Department of Music, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She has received grants and fellowships from Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the University of Toronto’s Connaught Fund, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and Oxford University’s Clarendon Fund, among other sources. In addition to her research and teaching, Prof. Copeland is a trained tubist and enjoys performing in orchestral and popular ensembles.