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Northwestern School of Communication

Shayna Silverstein

(she/her)
Associate Professor; Director of Graduate Studies
Website
Shayna Silverstein is currently researching the history and practice of sound art across the South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region, asking how sonic praxis voices histories, geographies, and socialities of this region in ways that shape contemporary art worlds and their global politics.

Department

Performance Studies

Area(s) of Expertise

Dance, Dance Studies, Ethnography, Ethnomusicology, MENA Studies, Social Theory, Sound Cultures, Sound Studies
Shayna Silverstein

Shayna Silverstein’s research examines the politics and aesthetics of sound, movement, and performance in the contemporary Middle East. She is the author of the award-winning book, Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria, an ethnography that analyzes how Syrian dabke, a popular dance music suffused with the collectivism and cultural memory, has paradoxically contributed to isolation and fragmentation within Syrian society from the formation of the authoritarian nation-state to the recent conflict. Fraught Balance received the 2025 de la Torre Bueno® First Book Award presented by the Dance Studies Association, the 2025 Best Book Award by the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies, and the 2025 Keaalinohomoku Award from the Dance, Movement, and Gesture section of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Her book also received two Honorable Mentions for the 2025 International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance (ICTMD) Book Prize, and the 2025 Ruth Stone Prize for Outstanding Monograph in Ethnomusicology by the Society for Ethnomusicology. 

Silverstein's publications include an award-winning article in the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, an audiography in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image, and articles in Music & Politics, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, and Lateral, among other academic journals. Her research has been supported by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Program, as well as the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. She currently serves on the Editorial Board of Northwestern University Press and Ethnomusicology (journal), the Editorial Advisory Board for the Sound Studies series of Bloomsbury Press, and on the Board of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Education

  • PhD Ethnomusicology, University of Chicago
  • BA History, Yale University

Publications

Book

  • Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria. Wesleyan University Press: 2024.

Articles

  • “’Keep[ing] My Boots Out’: Transnational Dabke in Arab Chicago.” In Dancing on the Third Coast: Chicago Dance Histories. Edited by Susan Manning and Lizzie Leopold. University of Illinois Press. 2027.
  • “’I Dance, I Revolt:’ The Migratory Politics of Syrianness in Mithkal Alzghair’s Displacement (2017).” The Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. 16: 3.
  • “The ‘Barbaric’ Dabke: Masculinity, Dance, and Autocracy in Contemporary Syrian Cultural Production.” Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies. 17:2.
  • “An (Un)Marked Foreigner: Race-Making in Egyptian, Syrian, and German Popular Cultures,” co-authored with Darci Sprengel, in special issue “Cultural Constructions of Race and Racism in the Middle East and North Africa” of Lateral, edited by Rayya El Zein.
  • “Mourning the Nightingale’s Song: The Audibility of Networked Performances in Protests and Funerals of the Arab Revolutions.” Performance Matters, Vol. 6 (2), 94-111.
  • “Disorienting Sounds: A Sensory Ethnography of Syrian Dance Music.” In Remapping Sound Studies. Edited by James Sykes and Gavin Steingo. Duke University Press.
  • “On Sirens and Lampposts: Sound, Affect, and Space at the Women’s March,” Music & Politics, Volume XIII, No. 1.
  • “The Punk Arab: Demystifying Omar Souleyman’s Techno-Dabke.” In Punk Ethnography: Artists and Scholars Listen to Sublime Frequencies. Edited by Michael Veal and E. Tammy Kim. Wesleyan, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2016.
  • “Public Pleasures: Negotiating Gender and Morality through Syrian Popular Dance.” In Islam and Popular Culture. Edited by Karin van Nieuwkerk, Martin Stokes, and Mark LeVine. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2016.
  • “Cultural Liberalization or Marginalization? The Cultural Politics of Syrian Folk Dance during Social Market Reform.” In Syria from Reform to Revolt: Culture, Society and Religion. Edited by Leif Stenberg and Christa Salamandra. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015.
  • “Transforming Space: The Production of Contemporary Syrian Art Music.” In The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity. Edited by Kay Dickinson, Thomas Burkhalter, and Ben Harbert. Wesleyan, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013.
  • “Syria’s Radical Dabke.” Middle East Report 263 (Summer 2012).
  • “New Wave Dabke: The Stars of Musiqa Shaʿbiyya in the Levant.” Out of the Absurdity of Life. Edited by Theresa Beyer and Thomas Burkhalter. Solothurn, Switzerland: Traversion Press, 2012.
  • Encyclopedia of 21st-Century Anthropology. “Music and Dance.” Edited by Jim Birxh. UK: Sage Press, 2012.

Awards and Grants

  • Winner of the 2025 de la Torre Bueno First Book® Award awarded by the Dance Studies Association
  • Winner of the 2025 Best Book Award awarded by the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies
  • Honorable Mention for the 2025 Book Prize awarded by the International Council on Traditions in Music and Dance (ICTMD)
  • Honorable Mention for the 2025 Ruth Stone Prize for Outstanding Monograph in Ethnomusicology awarded by the Society for Ethnomusicology
  • Winner of the 2025 Kealiinohomoku Book Prize awarded by the Dance, Movement, and Gesture Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology
  • AMS 75 PAYS Book Subvention (American Musicological Society), 2023
  • Marcia Herndon Article Award (Gender and Sexualities Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology), 2022
  • Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, 2018-19
  • Institute for Citizens & Scholars Career Enhancement Fellowship, 2017 
  • Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Penn Humanities Forum, University of Pennsylvania, 2013-14
  • Franke Dissertation Fellowship, University of Chicago, 2010
  • Fulbright-IIE Fellowship, Syria, 2008

Courses

  • PS 220: Sound Cultures
  • PS 304: Sonic Practices of the Middle East and North Africa
  • PS 312: Yoga: Pedagogy, Practice, and Politics
  • PS 330: Contemporary Middle Eastern Performance
  • PS 515: Listening: Methods and Issues
  • PS 515: Sound Ethnography
  • PS 515: Bodies, States, and Aesthetics: New Directions in Culture and Theory in SWANA studies