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. This work builds on Dr. Ramzy’s dissertation, “The Politics of (Dis)Engagement: Coptic Christian Revival and the Performative Politics of Song” (2014) that followed a powerful religious revival that used popular song to combat, and at times, comply with structural marginalization in Egypt and abroad. Dr. Ramzy also traces how these religious song and hymns, 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.
