DIRECTORY LISTING
Biography
David Font-Navarrete
David Font-Navarrete is Associate Professor in the Department Music at Lehman College, a senior college of the City University of New York (CUNY), and he is a member of the doctoral faculty in Music at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Recurring themes in his research include: the confluence of Afro-Atlantic cultural traditions, avant-garde art, and ethnography; cultural archives; and multimedia technologies. His research publications include journal articles and edited volumes. His annotated English translation of Lydia Cabrera's El Monte was published in 2023 by Duke University Press and received an Honorable Mention from the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) 2023 Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work.
Font-Navarrete’s current projects include: an annotated archival edition of: a translation of Rosa Marquetti’s Celia Cruz en Cuba (1925-1962); an edited volume titled The Music in Lydia Cabrera’s El Monte (1954) and The Sacred Lagoon (1973); and a monograph, Art at the Edge of Tradition: Notes on Orisha, Music, and the Age of Multimedia, for the Underground Culture series published by Indiana University Press.
Selected Publications
2023. “‘Forget the Rest ...’: Notes on Magnetic Tape and Other Antiquated Media as Archives of Afro-Atlantic Liturgy.” Peer-review journal article in a special issue (“Recitation and Ritual in Digital Worlds”). Yale Journal of Music & Religion 9 (2): 52-82. https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr/vol9/iss2/4/
2023. El Monte: Notes on the Religions, Magic, and Folklore of the Black and Creole People of Cuba. Translator (Spanish-English) and editor of the first annotated English-language edition of Lydia Cabrera’s magnum opus, first published in 1954. Foreword by John Szwed and Robert Farris Thompson. Introduction by Isabel Castellanos. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Honorable Mention for the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) 2023 Lois Roth Award for a Translation of a Literary Work.
2022. “Beyond the Archive: The Cabrera-Tarafa Collection of Afro-Cuban Music, ca. 1956.” Open access multimedia platform for collaborative research on Música de los cultos africanos en Cuba. https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/musicadeloscultos