As an ethnomusicologist, John Walsh is broadly interested in the relationships between music and cities. Specifically, his work explores the music scene as a flexible form of collective expressive culture that articulates relations between sociality, materiality, and aesthetics. His current research focuses on contemporary music scenes in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia under conditions of political transformation.

Walsh received his B.M. in Percussion Performance from Centenary College of Louisiana, his M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, and his PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley before joining the Mead Witter School of Music in 2023.

His research has been supported through two Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, the Cota Robles Fellowship, The John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellowship, the Rocca Pre-Dissertation Research Grant, and UC Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies and Center for African Studies.