Kyra Gaunt (Ph.D. University of Michigan, M.A. SUNY-Binghamton) is an ethnomusicologist and an Associate Professor of Music jointly appointed in FPA and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch College. Formerly on the faculty of NYU and University of Virginia, she is the first tenure-track music professor to specialize in teaching and studying hip-hop as music in 1996. Students often call her "Professor G" and her classroom and research interests focus on the impact of race, gender and the musical body as contexts shaping the social and musical meanings of contemporary African American music culture including girls' musical games, hip-hop, jazz, improvisation, and musical entrepreneurism. Her latest fieldwork and research focuses on the local performance of an African diaspora within the US. She has been studying the unfinished migrations of the diaspora expressed through the socio-musical interactions of Francophone African musicians from Mali, Senegal, Niger and Guinea-Bissau and southern-rooted African-American audience members in a historic Harlem jazz venue known as St. Nick's Pub.  

Her book The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-hop (NYU Press) was released in January 2006. Other scholarship has appeared in Generations of Youth (1998), Language, Rhythm and Sound (1997), and Feminism, Multiculturalism and the Media (1995), and in journals such as Musical Quarterly (2002) and AAA's City & Society (2002). She appeared as a notable ethnomusicologist in the American Masters documentary Sweet Honey in the Rock: Raise Your Voice (June 2005) and is regularly featured on local, national, and international radio offering her scholarly expertise on classical and popular subjects related to black music studies. Prior to receiving her doctorate in ethnomusicology, all her previous degrees were in classical voice. She is a classically-trained vocalist, a jazz vocalist and a R&B singer-songwriter.

Professor Gaunt is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation and a consultant for PBS's Zoom and the Daytime Emmy-winning children's program Between the Lions and the World Culture Open's Africa Program. She is a member of the Society for Ethnomusicology where she founded and leads an initiative called the Crossroads Project: The Committee on Diversity, Difference and Under-representation. She is also a member of IASPM, The Grammy Foundation, and the International Council for Traditional Music.

email address: Kyra_Gaunt@baruch.cuny.edu