Dr. Carolyn Ramzy

Dr. Carolyn Ramzy is a feminist and anti-racist ethnomusicologist who focuses on Egyptian Christian popular music in Egypt and a growing diaspora in the U.S. and Canada. Specifically, Dr. Ramzy examines how Orthodox music culture shapes the Coptic community’s gendered subjectivities, and the use of virtual technologies to challenge traditional understanding of (holy) belonging, sexuality, and faith. Dr. Ramzy also traces how translated missionary songs or spiritual songs, now translated for the diaspora, facilitate important conversations about Coptic experiences of racialization, gender and sexuality, assimilation, and belonging in an American and Canadian diaspora. Dr. Ramzy completed a Bachelor degree of Musical Arts and a Diploma of Ethnomusicology at the Eastman School of Music, a Master’s in musicology from Florida State University, and a PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music. She now teaches in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Carleton University and is cross appointed to the Institute of African Studies, the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation, and the Carleton Center for the Study of Islam.