Janie Cole

Janie Cole comes to Yale from the University of Cape Town, where she has been a senior lecturer (adjunct) at the South African College of Music (since 2015), research officer for East Africa as part of the University of the Witwatersrand and University of Cape Town’s interdisciplinary project Re-Centring AfroAsia(link is external) since 2018, and a research associate at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics since 2022. In addition to teaching at Yale she will conduct research on sacred music, architecture, and the senses in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia during the early modern Jesuit mission period, and pursue the completion of a book project tentatively entitled Music, Performance, and Foreign Encounters in the Christian Kingdom of Early Modern Ethiopia. Her other research areas focus on music and the anti-apartheid struggle in 20th-century South Africa and musical constructions of Blackness, apartheid struggle movement politics, violence, resistance, trauma, and social change; and the intersection of music, consumption and production, politics, patronage and gender in late Renaissance and early Baroque Italy and France. She is the founder/executive director of Music Beyond Borders(link is external). View a full bio here(link is external).