Associate Professor Sylvia Bruinders is Head of Ethnomusicology and African Music at the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town where she teaches courses in Ethnomusicology, African and World musics. A former Fulbright scholar, her dissertation on the Christmas Bands Movement in the Western Cape received the Nicholas Temperley Award for Excellence in a Dissertation in Musicology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has published several journal articles from this research and her monograph, Parading Respectability: The Cultural and Moral Aesthetics of the Christmas Bands Movement in the Western Cape, South Africa was supported through a Postdoctoral Fellowship of the African Humanities Program and published by NISC in 2017. She is currently the Director of the Mellon-funded Pan-African research project, Mapping Africa’s Musical Identities, which includes six universities on the African continent. She enjoys hiking, swimming, and Pilates.