Moad Musbahi is a joint Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. He researches the entanglements between bodily ailments, oral performance and financial relations within communities who claim ancestral belonging across Algeria, Libya, Niger and Mali. Taking the title, the ‘Wounded Speech’, his dissertation project considers how the voice’s wounding, funerary rites and percussive practices are used to articulate demands for land, 'the right to return' and how these trouble anthropological understandings of the economic.  

Theoretical frameworks within Gender and Sexuality Studies have been generative in expanding his ethnographic engagements on the surgical and psycho-social alterations of the voice, contending with how performativity is made physical and plastic for individuals occupying subject positions that span norms of gender and identity in the context of the Sahara. Moad holds an M.Arch. in Architecture, an M.A. in Writing and is a member of PLOrk, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, an experimental sound ensemble.