Frank Gunderson

Frank Gunderson is Professor of Ethnomusicology at Florida State University.

He received a BA degree from the Evergreen State College (WA), and the MA in World Music and PhD in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University (CT). Gunderson has held previous appointments at Ohio University, University of Michigan, and the University of Oklahoma, and once taught for two years in a village at Harambee secondary school in Kenya.

His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Gunderson's research interests include African and African diasporan history, musical labor, sonic repatriation, veteran's issues, biographical approaches, world guitar music, refugee communities, and documentary film.

Gunderson is an active member of the African Studies Association (ASA), the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and he is former president of SEMSEC (SEM Southeast and Caribbean chapter). He is editor (2018-2022) of the SEM academic journal Ethnomusicology and has also served as the journal's Film, Video, and Multimedia Review Editor.

He has published articles and reviews in Ethnomusicology, Africa Today, History and Anthropology, Soundings, and African Music, and has twice been a guest editor of the journal World of Music. He is former music director of KAOS radio in Olympia WA, where he worked with the Northwest "outsider" musician Travis Roberts, a project which culminated in several high profile indy recordings as well as an award-winning film co-directed with Bret Woods, called Human Skab (SnagFilms, 2012).

Gunderson has conducted extensive fieldwork in East Africa, and has produced the CD Tanzania: Farmer Composers of North West Tanzania (1997, Multicultural Media), and co-edited with Gregory Barz the book Mashindano!: Competitive Music Performance in East Africa (2000, Mkuki na Nyota Press/African Books Collective LTD, Michigan State University Press). His book “We Never Sleep We Dream of Farming”: Sukuma Labor Songs from Western Tanzania (Brill Academic Press, 2010) was the 2009-2011 winner of the SEM Kwabena Nketia Book Award for best African music monograph. He co-edited with Robert Lancefield and Bret Woods The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation (OUP 2018), and recently completed the dual biography, The Legacy of Tanzanian Musicians Muhidin Gurumo and Hassan Bitchuka - Rhumba Kiserebuka! (2018, Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield). His recent film Ng’oma: The Work of Our Clan is playing in film festivals worldwide, and he is currently working on a film about Mlimani Park Orchestra in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.