Scott Linford

An assistant professor of liberal arts at Berklee College of Music, Scott V. Linford is an ethnomusicologist who researches connections between music, community, identity, and politics through fieldwork in West Africa, Central America, and the United States. His dissertation, "Interweaving Worlds: Jola Music and Relational Identity in Southern Senegal and Beyond," explores several sites in which Jola people use music as a mode of belonging to the world at large, even as music is also deeply situated in local culture and politics. A scholar, filmmaker, and multi-instrumentalist most at home on the clawhammer banjo, Linford was formerly editor in chief of Ethnomusicology Review and a former director of the bluegrass and old-time string bands at University of California, Los Angeles. His work appears in Ethnomusicology Review and the Yearbook for Traditional Music.