Alessandra Ciucci is in her first year as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Columbia University. She holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation "Poems of Honor, Voices of Shame: The 'Aita and the Moroccan Shikhat,"  analyzes the relationship between a class of Moroccan professional female singer-dancers and a genre of sung poetry which forms the core of their repertory, combines ethnography, performance studies and a music-poetic analysis of the texts. She has received fellowships from the Fullbright, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, and the Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women. Her research interests include: Morocco, North Africa, Arabic music, Arab popular music, music of the Mediterranean, sung poetry, music and gender, dance, and performance studies.