Dr. Jeff Packman

Biography

Jeff Packman specializes in Brazilian music, popular music of the Americas, and cultural theory. His scholarly interests include music technoculture, music cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean, and Afrodiasporic performance. As a working drummer, his research emphasizes questions of race, social class, and cultural politics in professional music making. He has received support from the J. William Fulbright Program and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, conducting extensive fieldwork in Bahia, Brazil since 2002. His research has contributed to book chapters, edited volumes, and articles in scholarly journals including Latin American Music Review, Black Music Research Journal, Ethnomusicology, and Ethnomusicology Forum. Recently, he completed a post-doctoral fellowship at York University’s Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Global Migrations of African Peoples. Packman is currently finalizing a book on professional musicians in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and co-leading an interdisciplinary collaborative study of samba de roda, an Afro-Diasporic music and dance complex recognized as a UNESCO masterpiece of oral intangible heritage. At the University of Toronto, Professor Packman teaches a variety of ethnomusicology research theory and methods courses in the Faculty of Music’s History and Culture Division of the Graduate Program in Performance, and he has served as Associate Dean for Graduate Education in the Faculty of Music.

Research Interests