Dave Fossum

Dave Fossum is an assistant professor in the School of Music. Combining extensive ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, he studies ideas about creativity and intellectual property, focusing particularly on music in Turkey and Central Asia. He has received fellowships and grants from Brown University, the University of Pittsburgh, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and the Reed Foundation. He has published articles on traditional music in Turkmenistan and has presented papers at numerous conferences including The Society for Ethnomusicology, Analytical Approaches to World Music, and the East Coast Semiotic Anthropology Conference, among others. He is currently writing a monograph titled "Copyright Consciousness: Musical Creativity and Intellectual Property in Turkey." The book examines how the reform of Turkey's intellectual property regime since the 1980s has reshaped musical creativity. Focusing on the entire music sector but particularly on the genre of mass-mediated folk music, the project documents how Turkey's copyright system emerges from a complex negotiation among internationally circulating legal concepts and structures, the competing interests of local actors, and conceptions of creativity and national belonging.