Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology
P.O. Box 1848
University, MS 38677-1848
Phone: 662-915-7421
Office: Leavell 103
E-mail: dgilman@olemiss.edu
Biography
I was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and earned my BA at Haverford College. I earned my MA and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, in the Folklore and Public Culture program of the Department of Anthropology there. My research focuses on the production and consumption of the pop music industry based in Cairo, Egypt, where I have lived for approximately three years. I come to Ole Miss directly from Cairo, where I had gone for what was supposed to be a very uneventful postdoctoral fellowship through the American Research Center in Egypt. Instead, I got to witness the 2011 Revolution up close, for which I am very grateful.
Research
As an anthropologist of expressive culture, I am drawn to the aesthetics of Cairo’s pop music industry — a massive transnational enterprise with a long history in Egypt, and about which people there have complicated feelings. The main thrust of my work is the analysis of contemporary pop music aesthetics, and how these aesthetics have shifted enormously over the past sixty years; these aesthetics have a great deal to do with political, economic, and cultural transformations in Egypt over the same time period. I am currently writing a book based on this research, tentatively entitled Sex, Music, and Nationhood: Aesthetics of pop music and nationalism in Cairo.
Publications
2009. Flirting with respectability: Gender relations in the private public sphere. Text Practice Performance 7:80-93.
Courses Taught
Introductory Cultural Anthropology
Accessibility