Tony Dumas, PhD

Anthony (Tony) Dumas teaches in the Department of Theatre and Music Studies and the Delta College Program at the College at Brockport, SUNY. Prior to coming to Brockport, Professor Dumas taught at UC Davis, Woodland Community College, St. Lawrence University, and SUNY Potsdam.

Professor Dumas is an ethnomusicologist whose primary research is located at the conceptual intersection of Mediterranean, American, and Caribbean musics, cultures, and identities. His dissertation, (Re)Locating Flamenco: Bohemian Cosmopolitanism in Northern California, examines California's flamenco scene as part of an American bohemian counterculture and shows how Norther California's flamenco community maintains an identity that is at once rooted in flamenco conventions, localized traditions, and cosmopolitan ideals. Dumas reveals a subtle undercurrent of Zen Buddhist-inspired philosophy and a countercultural ideology that allies California's flamenco community with North American folk music revivalists and San Francisco’s Beat poets. Additionally, his work provides an account of flamenco as a transnational genre that fuses with jazz, Cuban son, new age, Americana, and even heavy metal, resulting in complex identities that revolve around romanticized notions of the Spanish “Gypsy.”

Professor Dumas has written for the Grove Dictionary of American Music and has presented papers at regional, national, and international meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), and the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM). He is also the 2011 recipient of the Lise Waxer Prize in popular music (PMS-SEM) for his work on the commodification of flamenco in the United States.