Dave Fossum

About Fellow

Dave Fossum is an associate professor in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre at Arizona State University. Combining extensive ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, he studies creativity and intellectual property, focusing particularly on music in Turkey and Central Asia. He has received fellowships and grants from Brown University, the University of Pittsburgh, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Reed Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. His research has been published in journals including Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Analytical Approaches to World Music, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Asian Music, Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA, and Law and Social Inquiry. He has presented papers at numerous conferences including The Society for Ethnomusicology, Analytical Approaches to World Music, Law and Society Association, and the East Coast Semiotic Anthropology Conference, among others.

Fossum’s first book, Copyright Consciousness: Musical Creativity and Intellectual Property in Turkey (Wesleyan University Press 2025), explores the mutual influence of intellectual property law, musical creativity, and state cultural policy in Turkey’s vibrant music industry. Drawing on ethnographic and archival data from the past five decades, this book is among the first in-depth ethnographies of music and the law. It tracks how a broad range of industry actors make sense of and respond to the music copyright system’s purported failures and perceived injustices, often integrating their experiences into larger narratives about Turkish society, the nature and value of musical creativity, and the histories of national genres, especially folk music. He is now at work on his second monograph, a study of creativity in the traditional music of Central Asian Turkmens.

Selected Publications

• Fossum, Dave. Copyright Consciousness: Musical Creativity and Intellectual Property in Turkey. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2025.
• Fossum, Dave. “Legal Consciousness and Cultural Intimacy in Turkey’s Intellectual Property Reform.” Law & Social Inquiry 50, no. 2 (2025): 538–68.
• Fossum, Dave. “Authors and Burners: Imagining Creative Agency in Turkey’s Musical Folklore.” Ethnomusicology Forum 32, no. 1 (2023): 1–21.
• Fossum, Dave. “Principles of Transmission and Collective Composition in Turkmen Dutar Performance.” Analytical Approaches to World Music 5, no. 2 (2017): 1–37.
• Fossum, Dave. “Westernizing Reform and Indigenous Precedent in Traditional Music: Insights from Turkmenistan.” Ethnomusicology 59, no. 2 (2015): 202–26.