Carolyn Ramzy

Dr. Carolyn Ramzy is an ethnomusicologist who focuses on Egyptian Christian popular music in Egypt and a growing diaspora in the U.S. and Canada. Specifically, Dr. Ramzy examines how Orthodox music culture shapes the Coptic community’s gendered subjectivities, and the use of virtual technologies to challenge traditional understanding of (holy) belonging, sexuality, and faith. This work builds on Dr. Ramzy’s dissertation, “The Politics of (Dis)Engagement: Coptic Christian Revival and the Performative Politics of Song” (2014) that followed a powerful religious revival that used popular song to combat, and at times, comply with structural marginalization as well as sectarian conflict in Egypt and abroad. Dr. Ramzy also traces how these song and hymns, now translated for the diaspora, facilitate important conversations about Coptic experiences of racialization, assimilation, and belonging in an American and Canadian diaspora.

Dr. Ramzy completed a Bachelor degree of Musical Arts and a Diploma of Ethnomusicology at the Eastman School of Music, a Master’s in musicology from Florida State University, and a PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music.

Dr. Ramzy is cross appointed to the Institute of African Studies (IAS), the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture (ICSLAC), and the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies, the Carleton Center for the Study of Islam, and Music. Dr. Ramzy teaches courses on ethnomusicology theory and method, music and religion, sounded globalization, as well as music and conflict.