Office: Cate 5, Room 172
Email: amandaminks@ou.edu
Education: Ph.D., Columbia University, 2006
Amanda Minks is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist whose research has focused on the social and aesthetic practices of communication across cultures. Dr. Minks conducted long-term ethnographic and linguistic anthropological research for her first book, Voices of Play: Miskitu Children's Speech and Song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua (University of Arizona Press, 2013). Studying vocal play revealed how Indigenous children used creative forms, multilingualism, and media to stake claims of belonging in a multiethnic community on the fringes of the nation-state. Dr. Minks' second book, entitled Indigenous Audibilities: Music, Heritage, and Collections in the Americas, is based on archival research in the U.S., Mexico, Nicaragua, and Chile (Oxford University Press, 2024). This book presents a social-historical method of listening, reading, and thinking beyond the referentiality of archived texts, and in the process uncovers neglected genealogies of cultural music research. Dr. Minks is also engaged in a collaborative, public-facing digital project, the Indigenous Media Portal, which will help make Indigenous collections at OU more accessible to heritage communities and others.
Minks, Amanda. 2024. Indigenous Audibilities: Music, Heritage, and Collections in the Americas. New York: Oxford University Press.
Minks, Amanda and Ana María Ochoa Gautier. 2021.“Music, Language, Aurality: Latin American and Caribbean Resoundings.” Annual Review of Anthropology 50:23-39.
Minks, Amanda. 2021. “Henrietta Yurchenco, música indígena e indigenismo interamericano en la década de 1940.” Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 17(4):423-444.
Minks, Amanda. 2021. “Auralidad e interculturalidad en la Vanguardia nicaragüense.” Trans: Revista Transcultural de Música 24:1-19.
Minks, Amanda. 2020. “Inter-American Mediations: Charles Seeger, Domingo Santa Cruz, and the Politics of Transnational Musical Exchange.” Latin American Music Review 41(1):93-119.
Minks, Amanda. 2013. Voices of Play: Miskitu Children’s Speech and Song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
