Fraught Balance Awards, Reviews, and Mentions
Winner of the 2025 de la Torre Bueno First Book® Award awarded by the Dance Studies Association
Winner of the 2025 Best Book Award awarded by the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies
Honorable Mention for the 2025 Book Prize awarded by the International Council on Traditions in Music and Dance (ICTMD)
Honorable Mention for the 2025 Ruth Stone Prize for Outstanding Monograph in Ethnomusicology awarded by the Society for Ethnomusicology
Winner of the 2025 Kealiinohomoku Book Prize awarded by the Dance, Movement, and Gesture Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology
The Markaz Review “30 Recommended Books on Syria“
The Markaz Review “Top 10 Books to Read this Fall” (2024)
Interviews and Podcasts
Borderlines conversation with Lidia Helou
New Books Network podcast with Dr. Fulya Pinar
The Roundtable Perspective, Lakeshore PBS
Upcoming Keynote & Book Talks
Past Book Talks
Selected past research talks
April 2026 Keynote Speaker: Music and Hate Symposium (UCLA)
October 2025 Keynote Speaker: Society for Arab Music Research
Arizona State University, Villanova University (Center for Arab and Islamic Studies), Temple University, American Musicology Society (Book Launch Party), Kalamazoo College, University of Notre Dame, University of Birmingham (reading group for critical music and sound studies), Evanston Public Library, Georgetown University, Peabody Institute of Music (John Hopkins University), School of the Art Institute Chicago, University of Cambridge (Music), Northwestern University in Qatar (IAS series), Northwestern University (Music Department; MENA program)
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mead Witter School of Music
University of California Berkeley, Arts Research Center
Lund University, Center for Middle Eastern Studies (Sweden)
Selected Convenings
On Time: Intensities, Socialities, and Temporalities across Studies in Performance, Performance Studies Summer Institute Northwestern University
Listening In: Politics and Affect in the SWANA region, Northwestern University
Selected past conferences
Touching Sound: Passion and Global Politics, Aga Khan University, London.
Revolutions in Sound. University of Maryland.
The Revolutionary Public Sphere: Contention, Communication, and Culture in the Arab Uprisings, University of Pennsylvania.
Islam and the Performing Arts, University of Nijmegen, Amsterdam.
Bashar al-Asad’s First Decade: A Period of Transition for Syria? Lund University, Sweden.
Musicians and Artists in Exile: Preserving, Creating or
Eulogizing Syrian Culture? Cambridge University.
Shayna M. Silverstein 