Professor Kurtz’s research focuses on Afro-Brazilian music, sound, movement, and dance practices. She teaches courses on topics such as ethnographic methods, ethnomusicology, sound and dance studies, jazz, and American popular music.
Professor Kurtz’s research focuses on Afro-Brazilian music, sound, movement, and dance practices. She teaches courses on topics such as ethnographic methods, ethnomusicology, sound and dance studies, jazz, and American popular music.
Esther Viola Kurtz received her B.M. at the Eastman School of Music (1998), her M.M. at the Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands (2003), and her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at Brown University (2018).
Her current book project, A Beautiful Fight: The Racial Politics of Capoeira Angola in Backland Bahia, is under contract with University of Michigan Press on the Music and Social Justice series. The ethnographic study explores capoeira’s powerful potentials to motivate antiracist political action while also critically examining the implications of growing white participation in such a spiritual and political Afro-Brazilian practice. The book argues that white practitioners occupying space in capoeira divert attention from Black members’ concerns and reproduce colonialist logics of extraction, thus complicating claims that shared music/dance bridge difference and facilitate cross-racial unity. Yet while this hinders capoeira’s potentials to improve Black lives, the book proposes that capoeira nevertheless transmits knowledge, tools, and wisdom that can be leveraged to collaboratively contest racist coloniality and imagine a more just world. Her second book project extends her concerns about racial politics to consider how jazz musicians in St. Louis navigate the conditions of late racial capitalism to make a living, theorize their tradition, build community, and define their own value system.
Professor Kurtz has published in Women & Music, Ethnomusicology, and Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies. She has presented at national and international conferences, including at annual meetings of the Brazilian Studies Association, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Dance Studies Association, the Collegium for African Diasporic Dance, Analytical Approaches to World Music Conference, and the Society for American Music.
Her work has been supported by the BECHS-Africa Fellowship sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, the Center for the Humanities Summer Faculty Research Grant (WUSTL), Mellon Foundation’s Graduate Dissertation Workshop, the Professor James N. Green Grant for research in Brazil, Brown University's Office of Global Engagement Global Mobility Graduate Research Fellowship, and the Mellon Summer Seminar in Dance Studies.
Courses:
Undergraduate:
Music, Sound and the Body
American Popular Music and Media
History of Jazz
Introduction to Ethnomusicology
Graduate:
Methods and Ethics of Music Ethnography