Dr. Dave Fossum | UNC Music Research Forum

“Title TBA”

Dave Fossum is an associate professor in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre. Combining extensive ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, he studies creativity and intellectual property, focusing particularly on music in Turkey and Central Asia. He has received fellowships and grants from Brown University, the University of Pittsburgh, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Reed Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. His research has been published in journals including Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Analytical Approaches to World Music, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Asian Music, Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA, and Law and Social Inquiry. He has presented papers at numerous conferences including The Society for Ethnomusicology, Analytical Approaches to World Music, Law and Society Association, and the East Coast Semiotic Anthropology Conference, among others. His first book, Copyright Consciousness: Musical Creativity and Intellectual Property in Turkey (Wesleyan University Press 2025), explores the mutual influence of intellectual property law, musical creativity, and state cultural policy in Turkey’s vibrant music industry. Drawing on ethnographic and archival data from the past five decades, this book is among the first in-depth ethnographies of music and the law. It tracks how a broad range of industry actors make sense of and respond to the music copyright system’s purported failures and perceived injustices, often integrating their experiences into larger narratives about Turkish society, the nature and value of musical creativity, and the histories of national genres, especially folk music. He is now at work on his second monograph, a study of creativity in the traditional music of Central Asian Turkmens.

The UNC Music Research Forum hosts invited lectures by distinguished music scholars from around the world and informal research presentations by members of our department and colleagues across campus. It serves as an intellectual hub for the department and is open to all. The Forum is usually held on the final Friday of each month during the semester from 3:30-5:00 pm in Person Recital Hall.