Denise Gill: Publications & Awards

1. Books

Melancholic Modalities: Affect, Islam, and Turkish Classical Musicians. 2017. New York and London: Oxford University Press.. Awarded the Ruth Stone Book Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology.

This book interrogates normative assumptions about melancholy through present-day musicians who champion, teach, and perform “Turkish classical music,” a genre crafted after the foundation of the Republic of Turkey (1923) that is substantially rooted in the musics of the Ottoman court and elite Mevlevi Sufi lodges. While melancholy has been dismissed as a vestige of Ottoman nostalgia, Turkish classical musicians intentionally cultivate multiple melancholies in their soundings and music-making. Practicing melancholies emerges as deeply pleasurable, reparative, and sought-after experience of suffering that musicians validate through recourse to specific Islamic ideologies. Melancholic Modalities is an ethnography that intervenes in broad debates throughout the humanities about affect, emotion, sound, and music by offering new methodologies of rhizomatic analysis and bi-aurality. In prioritizing Turkish classical musicians’ ears and philosophies, the book unsettles epistemological assumptions in academic literature that maintain the idea of autonomous individual artistic production and continue an analysis of artistic genealogies in linear and teleological time.

Aurality and the Craft of Deathwork – in progress

Recovering the centrality of sound in a specific Muslim funerary practice, this book investigates multi-sensory embodied rituals at the liminal threshold between dying and being called into the grave. It is an ethnography that scrutinizes the consequences of a Muslim understanding that the deceased continue to have sensory capacities after death. It brings readers into intimate moments in the gasilhane, the state-sponsored facility in Turkey where deathwork is provided by state employees and monitored by authorities. This ethnography is co-produced with gassâleler, Hanafi Sunni women who clean, ritually wash, recite over, and shroud female deceased. While women working with the deceased follow state regulation closely, they also develop and transmit counter-hegemonic practices of inclusion as they build nuanced, individualized practices for the deceased. Letting the ethnography speak for itself, the book demonstrates how the gassâle practices are crafted and sustained through what Gill has named “posthumous aurality”—the knowledge that the deceased can still hear.

2. Articles (Select Listing)

2021            “Sense Experiences: Religious Affairs and the Tactility of State Power.” Public Culture 33(3): 393-414.

2020            “On Theory, Citational Practices and Personal Accountability in the Study of Music and Affect.” Special Issue: “Musical Feelings and
                      Affective Politics.” Culture, Theory and Critique 6(2-3): 338-357.     

2019            “Refugee Death and Lament as Epistemological Framework.” In Rasmussen et al. “Call & Response: Ethnomusicological Responses
                      to Migrants and Refugees.” Ethnomusicology 63(2): 279-314.   

2018            “Listening, Muhabbet, and the Practice of Masculinity.” Ethnomusicology 62(2): 171-205.     

2017            “The Listening Body in Death.” Sounding Out! The Sound Studies Blog. Special Issue: “Sound, Ability, Emergence.” 15 May.   

2016            “Turkey’s Coup and the Call to Prayer: Sounds of Violence Meet Islamic   Devotionals.” The Conversation. 10 August.
                      Republished as “What the Coup Sounded Like: An Ethnomusicologist on the Unusual Combination of Violence and Prayer” in
                      The New Republic.     

2011            “Performing Meşk, Narrating History: Legacies of Transmission in Contemporary Turkish Musical Practices.”  Comparative Studies of
                     South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 31.3: 615-631.   

3. Research Awards (Select Listing)

Faculty Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center (2020-21)

Jaap Kunst Prize, best article-length publication in the field of ethnomusicology (2019)

Ruth Stone Prize, best book in the field of ethnomusicology that is the author’s first monograph, Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM)

Marcia Herndon Article Prize, best article on gender and sexuality, SEM Gender and Sexualities Taskforce (2019)

Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Faculty Research Fellow (2019-20)

Annenberg Faculty Fellow, Stanford University (2018-20)

ACLS Fellowship (2015-2016)

First Book Award, Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis (2015)

Wong Tolbert Prize honorable mention, Society for Ethnomusicology (2011)

Sakip Sabancı Research Award honorable mention (2008)

Ki Mantle Hood Award, Society for Ethnomusicology (2007)

Fulbright IIE Fellowship (second award, 2008-2009)

Fulbright IIE Fellowship (first award, taken 2007-2008)