Production photo of Michael J. Love’s (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY! (OR, TO KNOW THROUGH THE RHYTHM) at Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX (April 12, 2023). Photo by Sarah Annie Navarrete.
b2o: an online journal is an online-only, free-to-read, peer-reviewed journal published by the boundary 2 editorial collective, with a standalone Editorial Board.
This special issue was solicited for b2o: an online journal by Arne De Boever and Kara Keeling. The peer review process for all articles was facilitated by the special issue editor Erin Graff Zivin and Arne De Boever (for b2o: an online journal). All articles were prepared for publication by Erin Graff Zivin and Arne De Boever.
Volume 7, Issue 2 (May 2025)
Special Issue: (Rhy)pistemologies
Special Issue editor: Erin Graff Zivin
- Erin Graff Zivin and Jonathan Leal—“Introduction: (Rhy)pistemologies–Thinking Through Rhythm”
- Michael J. Love—“Introduction to a Term: (Rhy)pistemology”
- Maya Kronfeld—“Rhythmic Concepts and New Knowledge”
- Michael E. Sawyer—“So What: Kind of More or Less Than All Blue(s)”
- Jamal Batts—“Black Queer Cadence: Hearing as Diasporic Seeing”
- Seth Brodsky—“Losing and Finding Death Drive’s Beat”
- Eyal Peretz—“Oppenheimer’s Arrhythmia–Between the Cinematic Image and the Atomic Bomb”
- Naomi Waltham-Smith—“Deconstruction’s Hemiolas”
- Alex E. Chávez—“Sonorous Present”
- Michael Gallope and Edwin C. Hill—“Drone, Groove, and the Specificity of Musical Sound–A Conversation”
Contributor Biographies
Jamal Batts is a scholar, writer, curator, and Assistant Professor of Black Studies at Swarthmore College. His work considers the relation between Black contemporary art, sexuality, and risk. Previously, he has served as a Stanford University IDEAL Provostial Fellow, a Curator-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow. His writing appears in the catalogue for The New Museum’s exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, Open Space, ASAP/J, New Life Quarterly, and SFMOMA’s website in conjunction with their Modern Cinema series. He is a member of the curatorial collective The Black Aesthetic.
Seth Brodsky is Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (University of California Press, 2017). Since 2019, Brodsky directs the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, which fosters experimental collaborations between artists and scholars at the University of Chicago and around the world, is executive editor of the biannual Portable Gray, and runs the music-performance initiative Gray Sound.
Alex E. Chávez, an artist-scholar-producer, is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also a Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies. His research explores articulations of Latinx sounds and aurality in relation to race, place-making, and the intimacies that bind lives across physical and cultural borders. He is the author of the multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke University Press, 2017)—recipient of three book awards, including the coveted Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (2018). He has consistently crossed the boundary between performer and ethnographer in the realms of academic research and publicly engaged work, having recorded and toured with his own music projects, composed documentary scores for Emmy Award-winning films, worked closely with Smithsonian Folkways, and collaborated with Grammy Award-winning and Grammy Award-nominated artists. He is co-editor of the volume Ethnographic Refusals / Unruly Latinidades (2022), which grows out of an Advanced Seminar he co-chaired at the School for Advanced Research, and his work appears in American Anthropologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of American Folklore, Latino Studies, and Latin American Music Review.
Michael Gallope is Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable (University of Chicago Press, 2017), The Musician as Philosopher: New York’s Vernacular Avant-Garde, 1958–1978 (University of Chicago Press, 2024), and co-editor of the The Scores Project: Experimental Notation in Music, Poetry, Art, and Dance, 1950–1975 (Getty Publications, 2025). As a musician, he has worked in a variety of genres that span a range of experimental music, rock, and electronic dance music. In Minneapolis, he performs with the minimal-ambient band, IE.
Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, where she is Director of the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab. In addition to her three books—Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (Fordham UP, 2020), Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2014), and The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Duke UP, 2008)—she has edited two special journal issues and three books, and published over 50 articles and book chapters on Latin American and comparative literature and media, philosophy, and critical theory. Graff Zivin is currently completing her fourth book, Transmedial Exposure: Towards an Experimental Humanities, which evaluates the ethics and politics of experimentation across media, forms, and disciplines.
Edwin Hill is Associate Professor in the Department of French & Italian and the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity, and a Faculty Fellow in the USC Society of the Humanities. His first book, Black Soundscapes White Stages (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013), builds a conceptualization of sound as a terrain of post/colonial conquest and contestation where one’s place in the world is critically imagined and experienced. Hill’s current book-in-progress, entitled “Black Static and the French Republic of Sound,” deals with sound culture and the politics of race and emotion in contemporary France. Hill’s scholarship appears most recently in the edited volumes: Sounds Senses (Liverpool UP, 2021), The New Modernist Studies (Cambridge UP, 2021), and Transpositions: Migration, Translation, Music (Liverpool UP, 2021). Edwin Hill is also the creator, host, and executive producer of Dance Hubs, an audio docu-series about street dance and spaces of creative movement.
Maya Kronfeld is assistant professor of theory in the Literature Program at Duke University, with secondary appointments in the Music department and the Philosophy department. Her book project, Spontaneous Form: Philosophy, Literature, Jazz integrates literary studies with Kantian approaches to the philosophy of mind and jazz studies. Her work appears in The Review of English Studies, Radical Philosophy and Jazz & Culture and is forthcoming in Philosophy and Literature, as well as The Cambridge Companion to Philosophy and Literature, the Cambridge Guide to Kant and Literary Studies and The Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory. Kronfeld is also a professional pianist who has collaborated with Georgia Anne Muldrow, Toshi Reagon, Linda Tillery, Nona Hendryx, Thana Alexa and Antonio Sánchez, Christian McBride, and Taylor Eigsti, and lent her skills to drummer-led projects by Justin Brown, Blaque Dynamite, Nikki Glaspie and Thomas Pridgen. Maya played keyboards on Nicole Zuraitis’ How Love Begins, which won the 2024 Grammy for Best Vocal Jazz Album, and on Taylor Eigsti’s Plot Armor, which won the 2025 Grammy for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. She is piano faculty at the Stanford Jazz Workshop, and performed most recently at the Newport and Monterey Jazz Festivals.
Jonathan Leal (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Dreams in Double Time (Duke University Press, 2023), which received an Honorable Mention for Best Book of Criticism, History, and Culture from the Jazz Journalists Association. His next book, Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape, is under contract with Duke University Press.
Michael J. Love is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist and scholar who, through a rigorous embodied practice, calls and responds to Black queer feminist theories and aesthetics as he rhythm-dreams of futurity. Love is Assistant Professor of Dance at Ursinus College. He was a 2021-23 Princeton University Arts Fellow and his work has been supported and presented by Fusebox Festival and ARCOS Dance. His research has been published in Choreographic Practices and he has presented at meetings of the Dance Studies Association and the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. Love’s video and installation collaborations with anti-disciplinary artist Aryel René Jackson have earned them the 2023 ArtPrize Juried Time-Based Award and the 2021 Tito’s Vodka Prize. In New York, Love and Jackson’s videos have been programmed by CUE Art Foundation and the New Museum and screened at the Museum of Modern Art. Recently, Love was one of four dance artists featured in filmmaker Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s The Trace Of An Implied Presence at The Shed. Love’s credits include the Broadway laboratory for choreographer Savion Glover and director George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along…, and roles in works by choreographer Baakari Wilder.
Eyal Peretz is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author, among others, of The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame, and, forthcoming, Messengers of Infinity:On the Pictorial Logic of Leonardo Da Vinci.
Michael Sawyer is Associate Professor of African American Literature & Culture in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He has authored four books: An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis (Palgrave: 2018), Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X (Pluto: 2020), Sir Lewis (Grand Central Publishing/Legacy Lit, 2025), and The Door of No Return: Being-As-Black (Temple University Press, forthcoming 2026). He is also the editor of the forthcoming Malcolm X in Context (Cambridge University Press) and the co-editor of Cambridge’s New Elements of Black Thought Series. He is the co-editor of the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy and on the editorial boards of Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, Critical Times, and the PMLA Advisory Committee.
Naomi Waltham-Smith is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and Douglas Algar Tutorial Fellow at Merton College. She works at the intersection of continental philosophy, sound studies, and music theory and is the author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford UP, 2017), Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham UP, 2021), Mapping (Post)colonial Paris by Ear (Cambridge UP, 2023), and Free Listening (Nebraska UP, 2024).