Dr. Sonjah Stanley Niaah

Dr. Sonjah Stanley Niaah is the inaugural Rhodes Trust Rex Nettleford Fellow in Cultural Studies (2005) and is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies’ Mona Campus where she currently heads the Institute of Caribbean Studies. Having authored Dancehall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto (2010, University of Ottawa Press), and edited “I’m Broader than Broadway: Caribbean Perspectives on Producing Celebrity’ (Wadabagei, Vol. 12: 2, 2009) alongside numerous journal articles and book chapters, her research interests around Black Atlantic performance geographies, ritual, dance, as well as popular culture and the sacred, have given her a solid place among experts on Jamaican popular culture, and Caribbean Cultural Studies more broadly. Sonjah Stanley Niaah currently serves on numerous national and international boards among them the Entertainment Advisory Board of Jamaica and academic journals such as Cultural Studies, Social and Economic Studies, Tout Moun, and Dancecult. She is currently Vice Chair of the Association for Cultural Studies and serves on the selection committee of the Rhodes Trust Rex Nettleford Fellowship in Cultural Studies. Additionally, Stanley Niaah is chair of the State of the Music Initiative which has staged an annual symposium since 2014. Her second book ‘Reggae Pilgrimages: Festivals and the Movement of Jah People’, and an edited collection entitled ‘The Sacred and the Popular: Cultural Studies at the Crossroads’ are forthcoming.