Maria Fantinato Geo De Siqu, Postdoctoral Associate

Maria Fantinato G. de Siqueira’s work focuses on sound, music, storytelling and the geopolitics of the sensorial in the Brazilian Amazon. They work at the intersections of cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology, sound and popular music studies, environmental humanities and decolonial feminist thought.

Her effort as a scholar and educator is to carve possibilities for making work that crosses the boundaries between writing and collaboration; to find a placing for theorizing music, sound and listening in articulation with struggles for socio-environmental justice in the Amazon, while also searching for modes in which song can be a methodology for collaboration that extrapolates the academic episteme.

At Duke, they are teaching and working on their book manuscript, tentatively titled: Land, Sound, Song: Listening, extractivism and clashing worlds in the Brazilian Amazon. This work is mobilized by the affective and intellectual exchange with people located in different portions of the Amazonian territory in the state of Pará and argues that sound, as it is storied in testimonies, and song, as storytelling, are a crucial part of the material battle of land in the Amazon.

Maria holds a PhD in Music (Ethnomusicology) from Columbia University (2021) and a masters in Communication and Culture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ, 2013). They also have experience as a cultural producer and translator.

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Teaching (Spring 2024):

• CULANTH 222S.01, SOUND IN SOCIAL LIFE Synopsis

  Friedl Bdg 216, WF 08:30 AM-09:45 AM

  (also cross-listed as ICS 246S.01, MUSIC 239S.01)