Jesse Weaver Shipley

Biography

Ethnographer, artist, and filmmaker Jesse Weaver Shipley explores the links between aesthetics and power by examining both spectacular performance events and mundane social life. He is the John D. Willard Professor of African and African American Studies and Oratory, Affiliated Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College in the United States. Shipley has done research in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Britain and the United States focusing on technology, popular culture, urban life, labour, race, gender and mobility. He is currently writing a book on the techniques of the coup d’etat.

His films and multi-media installations experiment with storytelling and portraitures and have been shown across Europe, Africa and the United States. They include documentaries Living the Hiplife: Musical Life in the Streets of Accra (2007); Is It Sweet? Tales of an African Superstar in New York (2013); and Portrait of an Artist (S (2017) as well as multi-channel installations Black Star (2012); High Tea (2013); and Anatomy of a Revolution (2019).

He is the author of two books, Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music (Duke University Press, 2013) and Trickster Theatre: The Poetics of Freedom in Urban Africa (Indiana University Press, 2015). His writings have appeared in various journals, including Public Culture, Social Text, American Ethnologist, Journal of Popular Music Studies, American Anthropologist, and Cultural Anthropology. He has also contributed to africasacountry.com, Chimurenga and thehill.com.

Shipley holds a BA from Brown University and an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago in socio-cultural anthropology. He studied art at Byam Shaw School of Art in London. He has received numerous fellowships, including from Fulbright and Wenner-Gren Foundation and was the McMillan-Stewart Fellow at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University in 2020–2021.

Shipley currently lives and works in New York City.