Alaba Ilesanmi

Focused on global Black music, sonic histories, and expressive cultures, Dr. Alaba Ilesanmi's work spans research, teaching, creative practice, and public engagement. He examines music as a living, relational practice and collaborative site where people, histories, and ancestral presences inform and shape one another.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, his work explores the intersections of music, sound, history, and culture, engaging questions of decoloniality, postcoloniality, globalization, identity, and indigenous epistemologies. His current research examines how intermundane relations among the living, the dead, ancestral presences, and other-than-human beings co-constitute musical and social worlds. Drawing African indigenous epistemologies into dialogue with (ethno)musicology, African and Black studies, diaspora studies, religious studies, and sound studies, his work contributes to conversations on music and personhood, sound and social life, death and afterlives, and human and more-than-human relations.

Ilesanmi pursues these intellectual commitments across scholarship, ethnography, musical performance, and collaborative public practice. He leads Twin Cities in Sound: Music, Community, Dialogue, a community-engaged public humanities project that brings scholars, musicians, artists, and audiences into conversation around music and cultural life in the Twin Cities. He directs the UMN Afrobeat(s) Arkestra, an Afro-pop ensemble exploring genres from Afrobeat and Afrofunk to Highlife and Afrosoul. He also leads the Pan-African Art Music Project, including its Concert Series and Commissioning Project, which fosters transnational collaboration, promotes African art music, and supports composers in creating new works inspired by and rooted in African musical traditions. These initiatives extend his scholarly commitments into spaces of performance, cultural exchange, and knowledge-making within and beyond the university.

His scholarship has appeared in Oxford Bibliographies in Music, Popular Music History, and The Conversation. His research and creative projects have received support through fellowships and awards from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Florida Education Fund (McKnight Doctoral Fellowship), the Presser Foundation, and the West African Research Association (WARA). 

Ilesanmi holds a PhD in Musicology from Florida State University, a BM in Music Education from the University of Texas at Tyler, and advanced certifications in music theory, piano, and percussion from the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) and Trinity College of Music, London.