We are pleased to share that Shayna M. Silverstein (PhD 2012, ethnomusicology) received numerous awards for her first book, Fraught Balance, The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria (2024).
The awards include:
- 2025 de la Torre First Book Prize® (Winner), by the Dance Studies Association
- 2025 Best Book Prize (Honorable Mention) by the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance
- 2025 Ruth Stone Prize for Outstanding Monograph in Ethnomusicology (Honorable Mention), by the Society for Ethnomusicology
- 2025 Kealiinohomoku Award (Winner) by the Dance, Movement, and Gesture Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology
Learn more about Fraught Balance and Silverstein below.
About Fraught Balance
Dabke, one of Syria’s most beloved dance music traditions, is at the center of the country’s war and the social tensions that preceded conflict. Drawing on almost two decades of ethnographic, archival, and digital research, I show how dabke dance music embodies the fraught dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationhood in an authoritarian state. My book situates dabke politically, economically, and historically in a broader account of expressive culture in Syria’s recent (and ongoing) turmoil. I show how people imagine the Syrian nation through dabke, how the state has coopted it, how performances of masculinity reveal—and play with—the tensions and complexities of the broader social imaginary, how forces opposed to the state have used it resistively, and how migrants and refugees have reimagined it in their new homes in Europe and the United States. I offer deeply thoughtful reflections on the ethnographer’s ethical and political dilemmas on fieldwork in an authoritarian state. My study ultimately questions the limits of authoritarian power, considering the pleasure and play intrinsic to dabke circles as evidence for how performance cultures sustain social life and solidify group bonds while reproducing the societal divides endemic to Syrian authoritarianism.
About Shayna M. Silverstein
I am an associate professor in the Department of Performance Studies and faculty member of the Middle Eastern and North African Studies program at Northwestern University. My teaching and scholarship broadly examine the politics and aesthetics of sound, movement, and performance in contemporary SWANA/Middle Eastern cultural production.
My first book, Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria (Wesleyan University Press) has received several accolades, including Winner of the 2025 de la Torre Bueno® First Book Award from the Dance Studies Association (DSA), Honorable Mentions for the 2025 Best Book Prize by the International Council on Traditions in Music and Dance (ICTMD) and the 2025 Ruth Stone Outstanding Monograph in Ethnomusicology by the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and Winner of the Keealinohomoku Book Prize by the Dance, Movement, and Gesture Section of SEM. I have also published an award-winning article in the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and an audiography, as well as other signifiant scholarly contributions in journals and edited volumes. My research has been supported by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Program, along with the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. I currently serve on the Editorial Board of Northwestern University Press and the journal Ethnomusicology, and the Editorial Advisory Board for the Sound Studies series of Bloomsbury Press. I also serve as Secretary for the Society for Ethnomusicology and as Co-Chair for the Society for Arab Music Research, among other leadership and advisory positions.
Originally from Spokane (WA), I have studied in New Haven (CT) and Chicago, lived and worked in New York City and Washington D.C., lived in Syria and Lebanon, and am now permanently based in Chicago. I hold a Ph.D in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in History from Yale University. I studied Arabic language at the University of Chicago, Damascus University, and Institut français du Proche-Orient (Damascus), and studied Arab music with Dr. Samer Ali, Dr. Issa Boulos, Wanees Zarour, Nazir Mawas, and many others. In my recreational time, I play violin as often as possible with city ensembles (especially Tayf) and orchestras. And, I enjoy play, travel, and cooking with my partner and kids.