This summer, the Center for African Studies was pleased to welcome Professor James Q. Davies as its incoming Faculty Director, along with Dr. Duncan Omanga as its associate director.
Professor James Q. Davies is a professor in the Department of Music, with musicological interests and expertise in the long nineteenth century. He authored the books Romantic Anatomies of Performance (California: 2014) and Creatures of the Air: Music, Atlantic Spirits, Breath, 1817-1913 (Chicago: 2023), and is editor of the UChicago Press book series New Material Histories of Music.
Professor Davies grew up in Johannesburg, with first degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand. He wrote his PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he later received a Junior Research Fellowship (Caius), before moving to Berkeley.
Professor Davies has published on music in Southern Africa, pre-colonial Gabon, and pre-colonial Cabinda. In view of modern ideas about the human as a uniquely musical creature, his research encompasses political ecology, elemental media theory, science and technology studies, climate-race discourse, and the ethics of humanitarian and religious intervention in Africa.
His current work centers on twentieth-century ideas about African music, with three projects in the early stages. The first is a book on the extractive (ethno)musicological search for the sonic origins of the human and African counter-humanisms at the so-called “Cradle of Humankind,” in apartheid-era West Rand Goldfields. A second longer-term and collaborative project, The Invention of African Music, accounts for the struggle over knowledge production in the area of study called “African Music.” The project maps this epistemic field by exposing the provenance of a considerable volume of materials, collected for the 1947 Ogooué-Congo Mission (Paris, France), the archive of the International Library of African Music (Makhanda, South Africa), the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv (Berlin, Germany), and the J. H. Kwabena Nketia Archive (Accra, Ghana). A third project will collect some of his previously- published essays into a monograph on “melocolonialism,” that is, on the sonic mediation of colonial experience as nineteenth-century melodrama.
Dr. Duncan Omanga holds a PhD from the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS) at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. He joins Berkeley from the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, DC, where he was a program officer in the Africa section. He also previously served as senior program officer at the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) and at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in New York, where he co-led initiatives under the African Peacebuilding Network (APN) and Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa (NextGen) programs.
Before transitioning to the U.S.-based policy and research sector, Dr. Omanga was Head of the Department of Publishing and Media Studies at Moi University in Kenya, where he also served as a senior lecturer in Media and Journalism Studies. He has extensive experience teaching and supervising graduate students across Eastern Africa, particularly in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Dr. Omanga was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge (2018–2019), and a 2015–2016 African Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for African Studies.
His research explores the intersections of digital technologies, security, and democracy in Africa, and he has published widely in both regional and disciplinary academic journals. His most recent work is the co-edited volume Digital Technologies, Elections and Campaigns in Africa. Beyond academia, Dr. Omanga is a frequent commentator and thought leader on issues related to higher education in Africa.