Dr. Moses Nii-Dortey

Moses Nii-Dortey (PhD in African Studies) is an ethnomusicologist, a Snr. Research Fellow and the Coordinator of the Music & Dance Section of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon. Nii-Dortey was a recipient of the African Presidential Fellowship, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2009), and the African Humanities Programme Fellowship from 2011 to 2012 with residency at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Nii-Dortey has published widely on Arts Research in Africa, Folk Opera in Ghana, Traditional Festivals as Integrated Performances, African Popular Music, the Ghana National Symphony Orchestra and also on the Disparate curricula issues in Ghana’s Pre-tertiary Music Education system. In the last 20 years, Nii-Dortey has also been involved in several applied ethnomusicological initiatives to safeguard Ghana’s endangered folk operatic tradition pioneered in the 1960s by Saka Acquaye. The initiatives have produced two staged renditions of The Lost Fishermen at the National Theatre in Accra, in 2007 and 2011, a documentary on the life and works of Saka Acquaye the operettist, and a short film Adaptation of The Lost Fishermen folk opera in 2023. The short film was produced by Kwame Crenstil and premiered at the Institute of Musicology, Bern University, Switzerland. Nii-Dortey is a member of and a joint editor for the Mellon-funded Mapping Africa’s Musical Identities research project involving nine music scholars working in six African universities. The Special Issue (SI) publication with Critical African Studies (CrAS), Routledge, is expected in 2025.