Moad Musbahi is a joint Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. He researches bodily ailments, performance and economic relations within communities who claim ancestral belonging between Algeria and Mali. Taking the title, the ‘Right to Return’, his dissertation project considers how the voice’s wounding, funerary rites and percussive practices are used to evidence demands for land, and how these trouble anthropological norms of genealogical method and legal status.

As an IHUM fellow, he will critically bridge more rigorous methodologies for sound-based research from physical anthropology to the emerging field of acoustic archaeology. He will study Sufi epistemologies, music theory and forensic methods that capture the sonic-signature of buildings, taking seriously the contribution of sound-art and theoretical-acoustics.

He is a member of PLOrk, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, an experimental sound ensemble and prior to Princeton, Moad received an M.Arch. in Architecture from the Architectural Association School Architecture, London and an M.A. in Writing from the Royal College of Art, London.