Francis Bradley

Francis (Cisco) Bradley is a scholar of social, cultural, and intellectual history set in diasporan contexts, as well as a cultural theorist and historical ethnographer. Since 2011, his work has focused on music and migration, particularly as it has manifested in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His current research focuses on the Great Migration and the emergence of music across the United States.

He is the director of the Music and Migration Lab at the Pratt Institute. The lab is composed of an international team of researchers who work at the intersection between migration/mobility studies and music studies. Together with partners at New York University, Rutgers University, the City University of New York, the University of Geneva, independent scholars, and musicians, the lab collects and preserves oral histories and leads mapping projects related to national and global cultural movements. The lab has recorded over 500 interviews with more ongoing. Some of the interviews appear on Jazz Right Now which Prof. Bradley founded in 2013.

His third book, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (Duke University Press, 2023) examines the rise and fall of the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, underground music scene from the late 1980s to the early 2010s as the vanguard of new American music at the turn of the millennium. The project examines the role of gentrification and global capital in the shaping of cultural production in New York City.

His second book, Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (Duke University Press, 2021), is a critical biography of the free jazz bassist. Situating Parker within the history of the African diaspora in the Americas, he charts the rise of Parker in the New York scene from the early 1970s to the present, illustrating his associations with many figures including Cecil Taylor, Milford Graves, Charles Gayle, Cooper-Moore, Daniel Carter, and Hamid Drake.

His first book, Forging Islamic Power and Place: The Legacy of Shaykh Da’ud bin ‘Abd Allah al-Fatani in Mecca and Southeast Asia (University of Hawaii Press, 2016) examines how an Islamic textual tradition became the currency for the rise of a transnational Islamic revivalist network originating out of what is now southern Thailand and extended across the Indian Ocean to South Asia, the Middle East, and southern Africa.

Bradley teaches courses that tell the histories of people in motion: migrants, travelers, seafarers, merchants, musicians and artists, pirates, pilgrims, fugitives, and refugees who have made homes outside of their points of origin.

B.A., M.A., Ph.D., University of Wisconsin at Madison.