Assistant Professor of Music Allie Martin has been selected as a 2026–27 fellow at the National Humanities Center, one of the country’s most prestigious residential research institutes for humanistic scholarship.
Martin is an ethnomusicologist and artist whose work explores the relationships between race, sound, and power. A faculty affiliate in the Cluster for Digital Humanities and Social Engagement, she was chosen from 453 applicants and is among 29 scholars selected for the 2026–27 class, representing humanistic scholarship across 15 U.S. states and Ghana.
Martin will spend the fall term at the institute working on her second book, Sampling for Black Life, which builds on years of fieldwork listening to and documenting Black sonic life across the United States. Over the past three years, she has sampled archival collections from the Library of Congress to create new soundscape compositions—a process the book will document in full. “The book endeavors to engage the sounds of Black life with rigorous care,” Martin says.
Sampling—the practice of excerpting and recomposing existing sounds and recordings—is a technique central to hip-hop and other Black musical traditions, and it functions in Martin’s work as both subject and method. Martin put the method to work during her 2024 residence as a Connecting Communities Digital Initiative Artist/Scholar-in-Residence at the Library of Congress, where she drew on three collections—Voices Remembering Slavery, the Chicago Ethnic Arts Project, and Now What a Time: Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals—to compose soundscapes that, as she puts it, challenge us “to sample as ethically and intentionally as we possibly can.”
At Dartmouth, Martin directs the Black Sound Lab, where she has developed what she calls “sampling with critical intention”—a practice now woven into her teaching and collaborative research. “It means paying attention to the historical and geographic context, and the ethics of how a sample was obtained before I begin working with it. Essentially I’m trying to do work that I can stand on,” she says.
For Martin’s students, that practice has taken on a distinctly local dimension. “I’m working with students to listen to and amplify the histories of Black life in New Hampshire, collaborating with the Black Heritage Trail of N.H.,” Martin says. This term, students are conducting soundwalks and soundscape recordings in Portsmouth, studying how local communities experience complicated and often violent histories through sound. Martin is also collaborating with faculty colleagues in geography, African and African American studies, and sociology.
In her first book, Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC, Martin draws on interviews, sound walks, acoustic recording, and machine learning to argue that gentrification ultimately serves to silence some voices and amplify others. The new project pushes that inquiry further.
“Sampling for Black Life is, in many ways, more ambitious than my first book, which focused on listening to gentrification in Washington, D.C.,” she says. “This book is multisited and multimodal, with case studies in Georgia, Texas, Chicago, and North Carolina. The compositions themselves will become an album that is released alongside the book. Having dedicated time to chart out this project will be invaluable from an artistic standpoint.”
“Professor Allie Martin’s work provides a blueprint for what it means to listen attentively—to hear what is present, what is absent, and what has been deliberately silenced,” says Colleen Boggs, associate dean for the arts and humanities. “This fellowship is well-deserved recognition of scholarship and of creative work that is deeply caring of the communities it engages, and that fosters understanding across a range of experiences and geographies. We are lucky to have Allie Martin here at Dartmouth to engage directly with her exciting work.”
Martin’s work has long extended into communities through residencies and public installations. In summer 2023, she was the Aminah Robinson writer-in-residence at the Columbus Museum of Art, where she recorded sounds of Black neighborhood life for This Is a Black Neighborhood, an interactive sound installation triggered by visitors moving through the gallery.
“I want to make work that makes Black people feel safe and make Black people be able to sound without subjection because we rarely get to do that,” she told southwest Ohio’s WYSO radio station at the time. “Black neighborhoods get reduced to these murals and these plaques that say, ‘This is a historically Black neighborhood,’ but they don’t actually want Black sound and Black people, and all of what comes with that.”