Nomi Dave

Nomi Dave is an interdisciplinary researcher working across music / sound studies, legal studies, and anthropology. Her research examines sound, voice, violence, and the law.

Nomi is currently working on two projects. The first is a collaborative project on sound, listening, and sexual justice. She is completing a book manuscript, Amplified Feminism, based on six years of ethnographic research in Conakry, Guinea. The book follows a series of legal cases to ask how testimony on sexual violence is voiced, silenced, heard, and amplified in the production of evidence, in the courtroom and beyond. Connected to this research is a documentary film, Big Mouth (dir. Bremen Donovan), which Nomi is producing with the filmmaker Bremen Donovan and the journalist Moussa Yéro Bah. 

Her second project involves research on audio remote access to courtroom trials. The project analyses vocal practices, sound technologies, and ways of listening in and out of court, in relation to the principle of open justice.

Nomi is the author of The Revolution’s Echoes: Music, Politics, and Pleasure in Guinea (2019, Chicago). The book explores music and the aesthetics of authoritarianism, considering how musicians and audiences navigate between pleasure and state violence. The book was awarded a Special Commendation from the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the Ruth Stone Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Before entering academia, Nomi trained as a lawyer and worked for the United Nations, including as a refugee protection officer for the UN refugee agency in Guinea. Born in London and raised between the UK and the US, she earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Florida, and holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology and DPhil in Music from Oxford. She previously taught at the University of Virginia, where she founded and co-directed the Sound Justice Lab.