Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, PhD, is a researcher on the UK Research and Innovation project Ottoman Auralities: Sound Media and Power 1789-1922, and senior research associate at Peterhouse at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on tracing unbroken cultural transmission in Sephardim through music, politics and belief, and has been funded by the European Union’s Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship, the U.S. Department of State’s Senior Fulbright Program, the Posen Foundation, and others. Her forthcoming monograph, “Sontinuities: Cycles of Sound in Jewish Northern Morocco,” will be published with Brill. She founded KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive, where she has recorded the voices of aging Moroccan Jews with an emphasis on women's oral traditions, and she chairs the International Council for Traditional Music’s Mediterranean Music Study Group. She has three multi-lingual sons under age 15 who are fully committed to their Sephardi traditions.
