Alaba Ilesanmi

Alaba Ilesanmi's research, teaching, and public engagement focus on global Black music, sonic histories, and expressive cultures, with particular attention to the intellectual, historical, and social formations that shape them.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, his work explores the intersections of music, sound, history, and culture, engaging questions of and debates around 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. This work contributes to interdisciplinary conversations on music and personhood, sound and social life, death and afterlives, and human and more-than-human relations, drawing African Indigenous epistemologies into dialogue with (ethno)musicology, African and Black studies, diaspora studies, and sound studies.

As a public-facing scholar, Dr. Ilesanmi works at the intersection of creative practice, scholarship, and public engagement through collaborative initiatives in and beyond the university. He leads Twin Cities in Sound: Music, Community, Dialogue, a community-engaged public humanities project focused on music and cultural life in the Twin Cities. He directs the UMN Afrobeat(s) Arkestra, an Afro-pop ensemble that brings together musicians, dancers, creatives, and enthusiasts to explore genres ranging from Afrobeat and Afrofunk to Highlife and Afrosoul. He also leads the Pan-African Art Music Project and its Concert Series and Commissioning Project, which promote African art music and support composers in creating new works inspired by and rooted in African musical traditions.

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). 

Dr. 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.