Janie Cole
Assistant Professor of Musicology
Dr. Janie Cole (PhD University of London) is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Connecticut and a Research Affiliate of the Council on African Studies at Yale University. She is also Research Officer for East Africa on the University of the Witwatersrand and University of Cape Town’s interdisciplinary project Re-Centring AfroAsia (2018-) and a Research Associate at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (2022-). In 2023/24, she was a Research Scholar at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music and Visiting Professor in Yale’s Department of Music. Prior to this, she was a Senior Lecturer (adjunct) at the University of Cape Town’s South African College of Music for nine years (2015-23). Her research encompasses a broad range of subjects with a strong focus on interdisciplinarity, source studies and global music histories, including on musical practices, instruments and thought in early modern African kingdoms and Afro-Eurasian encounters, transcultural circulation and entanglements in the age of exploration; music, poetry and spectacle at the intersections of consumption and production, politics, patronage and gender in late Renaissance and early Baroque Italy and France; and music, violence, trauma, and social change in the anti-apartheid struggle in 20th-century South Africa, especially musical constructions of Blackness and resistance in apartheid prisons. Her current work focuses both on early modern musical culture in the Kingdom of Kongo and at the royal court in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and intertwined sonic histories of entanglement with the Latin Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean world.
Dr. Cole is the author of two books, A Muse of Music in Early Baroque Florence: the Poetry of Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane (Florence: Olschki, 2007) and Music, Spectacle and Cultural Brokerage in Early Modern Italy: Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane, 2 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 2011), as well as numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters. She has built and curated the Malibongwe Women’s Archive of South African women’s struggle testimonies and music from apartheid prisons in collaboration with University of Cape Town Libraries Special Collections (funded by the Schlettwein Foundation), and co-directed the film We Are Not Afraid: Music and Resistance in Apartheid Prisons with the award-winning South African filmmaker-activist Shameela Seedat. Her research has been featured in the press, notably in BBC Radio 3 Early Music Show (2023), GQ Magazine (2023), and The Washington Post (2020).
Dr. Cole is the recipient of numerous fellowships, grants and awards. She has been granted fellowships from The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti (2005-6), the Newberry Library (2008), the Medici Archive Project (2002-5), won research grants from The Getty Foundation (2007-9), The Leverhulme Trust (1996-98), and The Italian Cultural Institute (1995-96), and been awarded the Stephen Arlen Award from English National Opera (1995), the Janet Levy Prize from the American Musicological Society (2010), the Author Grant Award from the Academic and Non-Fiction Authors Association of South Africa (2015), and the Claude V. Palisca Fellowship Award in Musicology from the Renaissance Society of America (2020).
She has worked at Christie’s New York as a junior specialist in the Books and Manuscripts Department (2000-01) and been invited to give guest lectures and present at Musicology Colloquia at New York University (2011-13), Syracuse University (2012), the International Studies Institute (2012) and Harvard University in Florence (2014), The Newberry Library (2008), Northwestern University (2008), University of Cape Town (2015), Dickinson College (2015), Indiana University Branigin Lecture (2017), Michigan State University (2017), Chicago University (2017), McGill University (2019), Toronto University (2019), Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University (2022, 2023), Stanford University Ron Alexander Memorial Lecture (2022), CUNY Graduate Center (2023), Yale University, Council on African Studies Lecture Series (2024), Tufts University Granoff Colloquium Series (2024), and Wesleyan University (2024). She regularly presents her latest research papers at leading international conferences, and was the invited Keynote Speaker at New York University, Medieval and Renaissance Graduate Interdisciplinary Network annual conference (2024) and the American Musicological Society Annual Conference Skills and Resources for Early Musics Study Group (2024). She co-organized the landmark international conference on Music in Africa and its diffusion in the early modern world (1300-1650) at Tours University’s Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance (2022) and spearheaded the groundbreaking international Symposium on The Black Indian Ocean: Slavery, Religion, and Identity (1400-1700) at Yale Institute of Sacred Music (2024).
Dr. Cole served as Council Member of the Renaissance Society of America as Discipline Representative in Music (2015-17) and is currently the founding Discipline Representative in Africana Studies at the Renaissance Society of America (2018-) and on the Editorial Advisory Board of Renaissance Quarterly. She serves on the Yale University Institute of Sacred Music’s Fellows’ Review Committee (2024-). She is the co-founder of the International Musicological Society Study Group Early African Sound Worlds and founder of the Afro-Asian Kukutana Ensemble, which develops musical performances rooted in indigenous East African music and its historical links to a pre-colonial Indian Ocean World sound- and visualscapes (with the première of Gabriel’s Odyssey (2021)). She is the founder/executive director of Music Beyond Borders, a platform for public musicology and engaged scholarship.
