Dr. Edwin E. Porras is the Inaugural Norton Family Assistant Professor of Music at Haverford College. He earned a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2020, where he specialized in Latin American musical cultures of the African and Asian diasporas. Thematically, Dr. Porras is interested in issues of power at the intersection of class, race, and gender, as well as in applied ethnomusicology and social justice. His dissertation Music-Making Practices of Cubans of Chinese and African Descent: Creating Alternative Ways of Being and Belonging unearths a less-known but fascinating facet of Cuban musical history. As a post–Ph.D. he has worked for the Smithsonian Institute and served as adjunct professor at California Institute of the Arts, UCLA, and California State University, Los Angeles. Currently, he is working on his first monograph and preparing to conduct multi-sited research on the music of Asian diasporas in Perú, Mexico, Panama, and Costa Rica. Dr. Porras is a member of the Applied Ethnomusicology and Latin America and the Caribbean Music sections, and participates in the meetings and activities of the organology group.
Courses
- MUSC H122 African Americans, Music, and the American Experience
- MUSC H140 Musical Cultures of the World: An Ethnomusicological Journey
- MUSC H144 Transatlantic Sounds: Music of Europe and America (formerly Worlds of Music)
- MUSC H240 Musical Cultures of Afro-Latin America
- MUSC H241 Music & Social Justice
- MUSC H242 The Lives of Musical Instruments
- MUSC H243 Ethnomusicology in Theory and Practice