Jared Holton

Jared Holton teaches Ethnomusicology and Musicology at UGA. He holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2022). As a multi-instrumentalist in North American, European, and southern/eastern Mediterranean traditions, he approaches teaching and research as a musician and as a global studies scholar.

Drawing on ethnography in Tunisia and Libya, his research examines how North African communities transmit and perform musical modes that are said to come from al-Andalus (medieval Muslim Spain), sub-Saharan West Africa, and the Eastern Mediterranean. His current book project discusses how these structures of sound and rhythm express non-musical meaning, relating participants to dynamic forms of identity, place, the nonhuman world, and the cosmos. His publications appear in Traditions of Music and Dance, MUSICultures, The Opera Quarterly, and the Asian-European Music Research Journal, among others. He presents regularly in academic and public venues, including a recent collaborative lecture-performance at the Library of Congress as part of the American Folklife Center’s Homegrown Concert Series. He is a past co-chair of the Society for Arab Music Research within the Society for Ethnomusicology.

His broader research interests include global music histories, sound studies, ecomusicology, and AI applications in writing pedagogy. He currently co-leads an interdisciplinary team developing an AI writing coach that supports critical thinking and writing across the humanities. His courses at UGA include surveys and special topics, such as Global-Popular Music, Music and Orientalism, Musics from North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, Mapping Acoustic Ecologies, and Introduction to Sound Studies. In his classes, he prioritizes active and collaborative learning. Students engage topics through small-group discussions, reflective writing tasks, hands-on work with media and musical materials, interaction with technology, interdisciplinary reading, and collaborative projects. He believes learning deepens when students arrive at insights through their own inquiry rather than through lecture alone.

He founded and directs the UGA Middle East Music Ensemble, a non-auditioned group open to students and Athens community members that serves as a forum for research and performance of music from Southwest Asia and North Africa.