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, where she continues to co-convene the Music and Sound seminar series.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Anthropology of music
• Ethnographic / co-creative methods
• Music in the Middle East and North Africa (especially Egypt)
• Cultural politics

My research focuses on how music shapes people’s interactions with the world, especially in the context of the Middle East and its diasporas. I am particularly interested in the affective, aesthetic and political affordances of music in reshaping social relations. I understand ethnographic and co-creative methods as vital tools that can prompt us to ask new questions about, and come to new understandings of, the past and the present. I am currently completing a book provisionally titled Shaʿbi Sounds: Music and the Politics of the Popular in Egypt, bringing together a decade of ethnographic and archival research, including a year spent working as a violinist with various shaʿbi bands. I am also editing a volume on Archival Acoustics: Sound, Archive and Performance in the Middle East and North Africa, which intervenes in critical debates about the potential of the archive to help us imagine beyond our present condition. Finally, I am in the early stages of developing a project on sonic Third-Worldism, which thinks through the role of music in south-south solidarities, and the cultural legacy of anti-imperialist struggles of the mid-twentieth century.

Teaching

Sophie has taught at the University of Oxford, the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and King’s College London, and has been an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2022. She has taught a range of courses on anthropological theory; gender and expressive genres; creative ethnographic methods; the anthropology of music; sound archives; and decolonising the university.

Selected publications

• 2025 “Listening to Shaykh Imam: Music, National Belonging, and the Egyptian Left.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 57(2), 215-237.
• 2024 “Cleaning up shaʿbi: Music and class-cultural divides in Cairo.” Ethnography, Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381241302530
• 2024 “Between welfare and exclusion: A history of Egypt's Musicians' Syndicate.” Égypte Soudan mondes arabes, 25, 73-96.
• 2023 “The Musicians’ Syndicate and the contradictions of state control over music in Egypt. Popular Music, 43(3), 292-309.