Phone: 858-822-0092
Office: CPMC 249
shankins@ucsd.edu
Dr. Hankins is trained as an ethnomusicologist, with research interests in sound studies of conflict in the globalizing metropolis, Afro-diasporic popular musics, history of technology, music and gender, and sonic dimensions of clinical psychoanalysis. Her articles appear in Black Music Research Journal, City and Society, Women and Music, Ethnomusicology Review, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; she also reviews new monographs for Popular Music and other journals. Hankins is currently writing a book on musical nightlife and political aesthetics among African refugees and migrants in urban Israel, which is an outgrowth of her 2015 Harvard University doctoral dissertation. She has held teaching positions at Wellesley College, Brown University, and the University of Massachusetts Boston. Hankins is the current Co-Chair of the Gender and Sexualities Taskforce (GST) of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and a recipient of the GST's Marcia Herndon Award. Her past fieldwork and research has been funded by the Anna Rabinowitz Fellowship at Harvard's Center for Jewish Studies. Ongoing projects include ethnographic work with the Black Lives Matter political movement, research on the intersections of sound, violence, and memory, and writing on ethnographic fieldwork ethics. A member of the U.S. Foreign Service from 2002-2009, Hankins served in Tel Aviv, Washington, D.C., and throughout Latin America, winning Meritorious and Superior Honor Awards from the Department of State for her reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a dance music producer and DJ, she has held club residencies in Boston and Tel Aviv, performed at the launch of Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation, and collaborated with electronic musicians and performance artists in a wide variety of idioms. Her remix collection Been in the Storm So Long (2009) was independently released in consultation with Smithsonian Folkways.