Dr. Sophie Brady researches the history of twentieth-century experimental music, focusing on connections between the European and African continents. Her first book, Towards a Global Avant-Garde: African Experimental Music and the Radiophonic Imagination, follows the musical lives and influences of a group of musicians from more than a dozen African countries who studied at the Studio-École, a radio school in Paris founded by experimental composer and philosopher Pierre Schaeffer. How does the existence of a robust tradition of musical experimentation on the African continent change our existing understandings of the avant-garde and African music? What does African musical experimentalism sound like? To answer these questions, Brady examines interconnected individuals and musical institutions spanning West Africa, France, and the United States. Through this transnational lens, Brady reveals how avant-garde composition was reimagined as a product of postcolonial movement—of both people and musical ideas—between continents, enabled by technologies like radio in the second half of the twentieth century. She has presented at national and international conferences, and her publications have appeared in the Journal of Popular Music Studies and the Journal of the American Musicological Society.

Dr. Brady received her PhD in historical musicology from Princeton University in 2024. She was awarded the Paul A. Pisk prize by the American Musicological Society in 2022, and her doctoral research was supported by the International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, the Chateaubriand Fellowship, the M. Elizabeth Bartlet Fund for Research in France and the Jan LaRue Travel Fund for European Research from the American Musicological Society, and a Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from the West African Research Association, among others. Prior to joining the University of Arkansas, Dr. Brady taught at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University and Rowan College of South Jersey.

At Arkansas, Dr. Brady teaches undergraduate and graduate-level courses on the history of western music, twentieth-century music, music appreciation, music and politics, and the history of musical technologies.