Education
- Ph.D., Ethnomusicology, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 2013
- B.A., Music Theory, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 2004
- B.Mus., Music History, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2002
Eduardo Herrera is affiliated faculty in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, associate professor of folklore and ethnomusicology at the IU College of Arts and Sciences, and director of the IU Ethnomusicology Institute.
Herrera’s research in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas integrates oral history, participant observation, historical analysis, and archival research. His work follows two main threads: the historical study of twentieth-century avant-garde music in Latin America and the anthropological examination of the acoustic dimensions of Argentine soccer fandom.
Herrera has dedicated two decades to studying twentieth-century Latin American Western classical music, dissecting the elite’s role in supporting avant-garde music. His 2020 monograph, Elite Art Worlds: Philanthropy, Latin Americanism, and Avant-garde Music (Oxford University Press), won the American Musicological Society’s Robert Stevenson Award.
The book posits the history of the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM, 1962-71) as a meeting point for local and transnational philanthropy, the framing of pan-regional discourses of Latin Americanism, and the aesthetics and desires of high modernity. It focuses on understanding how patrons, composers, critics, and listeners engaged in processes that legitimized elite groups and institutionalized the avant-garde in Argentina.
In 2018, Herrera co-edited the book Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America with Ana Alonso Minutti and Alejandro Madrid (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Herrera is currently working on two book projects. The first, Sounding Fandom: Chanting, Masculinity, and Aguante in Argentine Soccer Stadiums, uses sound studies, gender studies, and sports sociology to craft an ethnographic account that demonstrates how participatory sounding and synchronized movements in the stadium shape aggressive behaviors and gender identities. Based on fieldwork and textual analysis, he argues that public participatory singing enables fans to frame heteronormative, patriarchal, homophobic, and sometimes violent actions positively.
The second book project is Soccer Sounds: Transnational Stories of the Beautiful Game. Here, Herrera uses sound studies, critical race theory, performance theory, and gender studies as lenses through which to interpret different moments in soccer history.
Presented through short analytical essays, this book engages the racialized listening of the vuvuzela during the South African World Cup; chants for equal pay by fans of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team; increased antisemitism by fans of the Dutch team Ajax, the British Tottenham Hotspurs, the German Bayern Munich, and the Italian Roma; the national and transnational discourses highlighted in the history of the official World Cup songs; the participation of fans of the soccer club Al Ahly during the 2011 protests that deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak; and the neoliberal discourse of tolerance circulating among FIFA, fans, media broadcasters, and the Mexican Men’s National Soccer Team surrounding a homophobic chant.
Herrera’s distinguished career includes tenure at Rutgers University (2013–21), a guest position at Harvard University, and receipt of a University of Rochester Humanities Center Fellowship.
He serves as director-at-large for the American Musicological Society, interim council chair for the Society for Ethnomusicology, and board member for the Society for American Music. He has published numerous articles in journals such as Ethnomusicology, American Music, Twentieth-Century Music, Latin American Music Review, and Journal of the Society for American Music.