Faculty Profiles

Liz Matsushita is a historian of modern North Africa and the Middle East, with a special interest in race and ethnicity, colonialism, nationalism, anticolonial resistance, knowledge production, and music. Her book project examines the history of music and musicology in colonial Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and the ways in which music served as a political idiom that shaped French and Maghrebi understandings of race and power. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Music from U.C. Davis and received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2021. At Reed, she will teach courses on Middle Eastern music, the history of the Sahara, and anticolonial movements in North Africa, and also will teach in Humanities 110.