DrCharissa Granger

Dr. Charissa Granger is assistant professor in ethnomusicology at University College Dublin whose work theorizes Caribbean music and performance as liberatory practices shaped by love politics, and erotic knowledge. Granger holds a BA in Visual and Performing Arts (Northern Illinois University), and an MA (University of Amsterdam) and Phd in Cultural Musicology (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen). A former Marie Skłodowska-Curie LEaDing postdoctoral fellow at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Granger recently completed postdoctoral research in the NWO-funded Island(er)s at the Helm project, contributing interdisciplinary work on climate futures in the Dutch Caribbean. Granger co-edited Music Moves: Musical Dynamics of Relation, Knowledge and Transformation and their published work can be found in The Langston Hughes Review, Contemporary Music Review, Conflict and Society, and Esferas Journal.

Granger’s work invites readers to listen through the lens of liberatory love, to hear and feel how music and performance cultivate modes of care and intimacy, remaking the human and opening possibility. Granger is completing Performing Radical Love: Aesthetics of Liberation in Caribbean Music Practices, a critical intervention that reframes Caribbean musicking beyond resistance. Granger’s scholarship honours feeling as knowledge, and reimagines Caribbean music and performance as generative practices of possibility, and human reinvention outside colonial scripts. The book draws on autoethnography to situate Caribbean musics as knowledge practices, sites where ways of being, knowing, and feeling are continually reordered. Radical love offers a politics of being, and an invitation to reimagine what Caribbean music can teach us about freedom.