Sophia Enriquez

Sophia M. Enríquez (she/her) works at the intersections of Latinx and Appalachian music, migration, and regional culture. She is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Music at Duke University where she also teaches in the Program for Latinx Studies in the Global South. Sophia earned her PhD in ethnomusicology at Ohio State University as well as graduate certificates in folklore and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies.

Sophia’s dissertation titled “Canciones de Los Apalaches: Latinx Music, Migration, and Belonging in Appalachia” is the first full-length study of Latinx creative practices in the Appalachian region. She is currently working on a book project that expands this work and shows how longstanding narratives of Appalachia as a racial and ethnic monolith have obscured the movement of Latinx people to and through the region over the past century. Building disciplinary relationships across Latinx studies, Appalachian studies, folklore, and ethnomusicology, Sophia’s work sheds light on the complexities of the shifting U.S. cultural landscape in Appalachia and the South and offers new perspectives on Latinx community, migration, and belonging through music.

Sophia is passionate about community-engaged scholarship and has worked on a number of public folklore projects across the Appalachian region with the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation and ONLO (Oral Narratives of Latinos in Ohio) initiative. She is also a practitioner of both Mexican and Appalachian folk musics. Sophia has performed as part of a female folk trio, the Good Time Girls, in Columbus, Ohio, and regularly performs with the Lua Project, a Mexican-Appalachian fusion band in Charlottesville, Virginia. Sophia recently co-founded Son de Carolina, a Durham, NC-based collective dedicated to the study of the Mexican folk music tradition son jarocho, with Alexandra Landeros, and organized the first Fandango de Durham in fall of 2022.

Bio updated January 2024