Juan Diego Díaz is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at UC Davis. Prior to UC Davis, Díaz held posts as a lecturer at the University of Ghana and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Essex, the latter funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The funded research investigates the music of the descendants of freed enslaved Africans who resettled from Brazil to Ghana, Togo, and Benin during the nineteenth century. This research has produced a book called Tabom Voices: A History of the Ghanaian Afro-Brazilian Community in Their Own Words (2016) and the documentary film Tabom in Bahia (2017), documenting the visit of a Ghanaian master drummer to Bahia, Brazil. His articles appear in journals such as Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Analytical Approaches to World Music, and Latin American Music Review.

Honorable Mention, Portia Maulstby Prize, Society for Ethnomusicology
Honorable Mention, Kwabena Nketia Prize, African and African Diasporic Music Section, Society for Ethnomusicology
Honorable Mention, Alan Merriam Prize, Society for Ethnomusicology
Honorable Mention, 2022 BFE Book Prize, British Forum for Ethnomusicology

"Di'&az (ethnomusicology, Univ. of California, Davis) is to be commended for this thought-provoking contribution to literature on Brazil. The author raises a pertinent question about the term "Africanness," commonly used by scholars when discussing the remnant or extension of African influence in the cultural fabric of Brazil" -- K.W. Mukuna, CHOICE Connect, Vol. 59 No. 8

"Juan Diego Díaz's Africanness in Action is a stunning example of one of the most exciting directions for twenty-first-century ethnomusicology. By taking seriously musical analysis and the discourse of composers and performers, while also relying on deep ethnography and a broad understanding of the entangled flows of expressive culture around the Black Atlantic, Díaz shows precisely how central ethnomusicological tools can be in deciphering the complex—and often contradictory—ways in which rhythmic, organological, religious, historical, and sartorial symbols can be put into action by people living in the African Diaspora in Bahia." -- Michael Iyanaga, Assistant Professor of Music and Latin American Studies, William and Mary

"At once broad in its conceptual reach and ethnographically focused on the practices of selected performing ensembles, Juan Diego Díaz's Africanness in Action illuminates varieties and degrees of sedimentation of an essentialized 'Africa' in Afro-Bahian music. Combining attention to discourse and rhetoric with detailed musical analysis, the author unveils the multiple truths of influence, invention, self-definition and aspiration. This important and timely book will appeal to all who are interested in the practical reception of 'African music' by creators who possess the rights of heritage to extend its purview." -- Kofi Agawu, The Graduate Center, City University of New York