Shayna Silverstein is an associate professor in the Department of Performance Studies and a faculty member of the Middle Eastern and North African Studies program at Northwestern University. Her teaching and scholarship broadly examine the politics and aesthetics of sound, movement, and performance in contemporary SWANA/Middle Eastern cultural production.
Silverstein's first book, Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria, will be published by Wesleyan University Press in May 2024, with preorders available now. Silverstein has also published an award-winning article in the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and an audiography in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image, among other scholarly contributions. Her research has received support from the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Program, as well as the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. She currently serves on the Editorial Board of Northwestern University Press, the Editorial Board of Ethnomusicology (the journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology), the Editorial Advisory Board for the Sound Studies series of Bloomsbury Press, and the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Advisory Council.
Originally from Spokane, WA, Silverstein has studied in New Haven, CT, and Chicago, lived and worked in New York City and Washington, D.C., and spent time in Syria and Lebanon. She is now permanently based in Chicago. Shayna holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in History from Yale University.