Alejandro L. Madrid

Alejandro L. Madrid is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University. He is a music scholar and cultural theorist whose research focuses on the intersection of modernity, tradition, globalization, and ethnic identity in popular and art music, dance, and expressive culture from Mexico, the U.S.-Mexico border, and the circum-Caribbean.

He is the recipient of the 2023 Humboldt Research Award, the 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2017 Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association and the International Musicological Society for outstanding contributions to musicology, top awards from the American Musicological Society, the ASCAP Foundation, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch, the Latin American Studies Association, and Casa de las Américas, and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Scholarship Board, and the Ford Foundation.

Madrid is editor of the series Currents in Iberian and Latin American Music for Oxford University Press, and is regularly invited as guest professor at universities in Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, and Uruguay. Most recently, he served as music advisor to acclaimed director Peter Greenaway, whose latest film, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, is set in 1930s Mexico.