Wesleyan portrait of Saida  Daukeyeva

Saida Daukeyeva

Assistant Professor of Music

Music Studios, 306
860-685-5981

Assistant Professor, Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies

Assistant Professor, Medieval Studies

sdaukeyeva@wesleyan.edu

BMU Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory
PHD Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory
PHD School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Saida Daukeyeva

Saida Daukeyeva is an ethnographer and historian of music in Central Asia and a scholar of Arabic music theory. Her research explores the intersection of sound with social and political geographies in Central Asia, focusing on Kazakh music and expressive culture across borders. Her book-in-progress, based on extensive fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Mongolia, examines the impact of migration, socialist cultural policy, and national revival on dombyra (two-stringed plucked lute) performance among the transnational community of Mongolian Kazakhs. Her monograph Philosophy of Music by Abu Nasr Muhammad Al-Farabi (2002, in Russian) draws on archival studies in Syria to reconstruct the intellectual and cultural background to the music scholarship of Islamic polymath al-Farabi (c. 870-950). She has published on Kazakh traditional and contemporary music and medieval Arabic writings in edited volumes and journals such as Ethnomusicology Forum, Asian Music, and Review of Middle Eastern Studies, and co-edited the award-winning book The Music of Central Asia (2016). A trained harpsichord player, she has also studied the dombyra and the two-stringed bowed lute qyl-qobyz with master musicians in Kazakhstan.

Academic Affiliations

Office Hours

Tuesdays, 4:30 - 5:30 pm, and by appointment

Courses

Spring 2024
MUSC 297 - 01
Music of Central Asia

MUSC 518 - 01
Music and Embodiment