Samuel Boateng is a Career Development Research Fellow in Music at St John’s College, Oxford. An ethnomusicologist, award-winning jazz pianist and composer, filmmaker, playwright, and visual artist, he is also a recipient of the Heinz Endowment for the Arts award for his 2021 musical Sunsum is Spirit. His research has also been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Joseph Walsh Endowed Scholarship in Music, and the Andrew Mellon Humanities Engage Project at the University of Pittsburgh where he received his PhD.
Boateng’s primary research is concerned with Black popular performance in the Atlantic world and Ghana during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since 2011, he has been researching the history of jazz performance by Ghanaian musicians in Africa, Britain, and the United States. Developed at the intersections of African music and jazz studies, Atlantic history, and African diaspora studies, his research centralizes the continuous and mutual influences between Africa and the African diaspora in order to challenge colonial and Eurocentric narratives that place Africa only in the past of jazz, Black music, and the modern world. Boateng focusses on issues of identity, improvisation, decoloniality, Black internationalism, Pan-Africanism, cultural sustainability, music circulation, and transnational collaboration, and his work has been presented at national and international conferences, earning him the African Libraries Student Paper Prize at the annual Society for Ethnomusicology conference in 2019. This work is also presented in his 2022 film Accra Jazz Dialogues, in which he documents the stories, motivations, and music of contemporary jazz artists in Ghana’s capital city of Accra.
In addition to his work on jazz, Boateng pursues two other secondary research streams. From 2018 he took up a research project on intellectual property in African creative industries. He documents the social history of copyright in West Africa by focussing principally on the issue of media piracy, technology, and media access in Ghana. Through ethnographic and archival research, he investigates how state apparatus such as the police and legislation, music rights organizations, and the competing interests of local and international actors produce, transform, enforce, and challenge anti-piracy discourses in Ghana. From 2014, during his MA in Ethnomusicology at Kent State University, he begun to research the intersections of visual culture, gender, and sexuality in African popular music. With a focus on issues of representation, power disparities, and gender politics in African film and music videos, Boateng brings attention to the changing representations of women in Ghanaian music and investigates how artists continue to challenge the enshrined gender norms and inequalities in the music industry.
As an educator, Boateng lectures on “African Jazz Perspectives” at Oxford University. He has previously taught a broad range of music and dance courses as a Teaching Fellow, Teaching Assistant, Teaching Artist, and Guest Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh, The Juilliard School, Kent State University, McGill University, University of Virginia, University of Ghana, and the Brooklyn Music School. These courses include History of Jazz, Jazz After 1970s, Jazz Diasporas, Jazz Today, Music Theory, Fundamentals of Western Music, Music as a World Phenomenon, Popular World Music, African Dance and Drumming, Music Recording Technology, and Theories in Ethnomusicology.
As a musician, Boateng’s compositions have been performed by the Pittsburgh Jazz Orchestra, Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Kent State Orchestra, Quartetto di Venezia, Adepa Ensemble, and Afro Yaqui Music Collective. In 2019 he was awarded by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) for his large ensemble composition titled “South Saloon Balloon.” In 2021, he was an Artist in Residence at the New Hazlett Theatre in Pittsburgh, during which period he wrote, composed, and premiered the musical Sunsum is Spirit—an exploration of myth, migration, and collaboration in the African diaspora. Boateng is also the curator and developer of the Samuel Boateng/IAS Jazz Collection, which is a multimedia repository at the J.H. Kwabena Nketia Archives (in the Institute of African Studies - University of Ghana) that is dedicated to documenting jazz histories and discourses in Ghana.
