Byron Dueck (Music) awarded Leverhulme Research Fellowship

Professor Byron Dueck (Music, FASS) has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, to run from September 2026 to October 2027. The award supports his research on xylophone traditions in central Cameroon and the writing of a monograph on that subject, entitled The Portable Xylophone. 

His project follows musicians, instruments and sounds as they move between contexts of assembly and ritual, including weddings, funerals, the Catholic mass, community dances, political rallies, and nightclub performances. It will examine how the circulation of music creates resonances between sacred and profane, national and local, and indigenous and exogenous. 

The funding supports four months of fieldwork in and around the Cameroonian capital, Yaoundé, as well as periods for writing up the research. An initial research trip for this project was supported by OpenARC, The Open University’s Arts and Humanities research centre. 

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