Dr Sophie Frankford

Sophie is an anthropologist of music, with a focus on Egypt. She is currently a Research Associate (Ethnographies of MENA region musics) on the project ‘Beyond 1932: Rethinking Musical Modernity in the Middle East and North Africa’ (PI: Prof. Martin Stokes; originally assessed and funded by the ERC, now by the UKRI). She holds an undergraduate degree in Music (KCL), a MPhil in Modern Middle East Studies and 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.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Anthropology of music / ethnographic methods
• Music in Southwest Asia and North Africa region (especially Egypt)
• Popular music

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 the 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.

Teaching

Sophie has taught across anthropology, music, and Middle Eastern studies, including modules on anthropological theory; gender and expressive genres; creative ethnographic methods; and the anthropology of music.