Andres Garcia Molina

Dr. Andres Garcia Molina is spending the next two years as a research fellow in ethnomusicology at the State University at Fredonia School of Music as the recipient of a SUNY PRODiG Fellowship.

SUNY describes the PRODiG (“Promoting Recruitment, Opportunity, Diversity, Inclusion and Growth”) program as a way to increase the representation of historically underrepresented faculty at SUNY including underrepresented minority (“URM”) faculty in general and women faculty of all races in STEM fields (“WSTEM”).

While at Fredonia, Garca Molina will be working on his research, presenting some of his work, and teaching courses in world music for both music majors and non-majors. His research focuses on sound, labor and media in contemporary Cuba, and has been funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. His doctoral dissertation at Columbia University was on the politics of street vendor songs in Cuba during the reforms of Raul Castro, for which he conducted extensive fieldwork in Cuba. He was the recipient of the T. Temple Tuttle Prize for the Best Student Paper at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Niagara Chapter, and the same year was awarded a research grant from Florida International University to visit its Diaz-Ayala Cuban and Latin American Popular Music Collection.

He earned his Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University, a M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley; a M.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom/Aristotle University in Greece/Universidad Carlos III in Spain; and a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Georgia Southern University. He has lived and studied/worked all across the Americas including Honduras, Cuba, Colombia, Brazil and in the U.S. in New York and Berkeley. For the past two years, he has lived in Buffalo, where his current research is on music and labor, focusing on the history of Buffalo as an industrial center for manufacturing musical instruments (organs, player pianos, carousels, etc.). He is also developing a project around the intersection between music and data science.