Dr Ilana Webster-Kogen

Ilana Webster-Kogen is an ethnomusicologist by training, specializing in music, diaspora and ethnicity in the urban Middle East. 

She was appointed the Joe Loss Lecturer in Jewish Music in 2014, becoming Senior Lecturer in 2019, and works closely with the Jewish Music Institute (JMI) who support her position. Ilana studied Music and Ancient Semitic Languages (BA) followed by Social Anthropology (MA), and wrote her PhD thesis about Ethiopian musicians in Tel Aviv. Her first book, Citizen Azmari: Making Ethiopian Music in Tel Aviv, was published in 2018 with Wesleyan University Press in the Music/Culture series. The book won the Society for Ethnomusicology's Jewish Music section publication prize in 2019.

Ilana's current work explores a triangular circulation network for Moroccan Torah scrolls between north Africa, France and Israel. She considers the migration and trade routes of the scrolls and the people who use them, and she examines biblical cantillation and its attendant gendered and ethnicized performance practices. She commenced this work with the support of the JMI with the inaugural Judeo-Arabic conference-workshop Yallah in London in 2020, which will continue in Morocco in 2021. Ilana's work has appeared in Ethnomusicology Forum, African and Black Diaspora, and the Journal of African Cultural Studies.

At SOAS, Ilana teaches classes on Jewish and Middle Eastern music, hip hop, and critical/cultural theory. In 2018, she became a Senior Fellow of the HEA, and in 2019, she became the Associate Director for Student Experience and Outcomes.

Ilana joined SOAS in 2014 as the Joe Loss Lecturer in Jewish Music. She is the author of Traders, Chanters and Mystics: the Networked Afterlives of North African Torah Scrolls (2026) and Citizen Azmari: Making Ethiopian Music in Tel Aviv (2018), along with articles about Ethiopian popular music and North African ritual habitus. Ilana's interventions in these areas broaden our understanding of Jewish music by expanding scholarly knowledge of the music of underrepresented populations and by expanding the understanding of what constitutes musical activity.

Traders, Chanters and Mystics is an interdisciplinary ethnography of Torah Scrolls as ritual objects and subjects, and their role in embedding neighbourly relations into Jewish life over centuries. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, the book foregrounds Torah scrolls not simply as vessels of text but as agents with social lives and affect—as subjects that act within networks of devotion, memory, and migration. In analyzing the scroll's diverse afterlives—how they are celebrated and venerated, how they are chanted from in new surroundings (primarily in France), and how they are collected by Jews and non-Jews—Ilana argues for new readings of Jewish embeddedness in North African culture and history.

Ilana is actively involved in university service at SOAS, serving as Associate Director for Learning and Teaching (2019-2023) and as Head of the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics (2024-2028). She has held visiting positions at NYU Abu Dhabi and Yale University, and at SOAS, she teaches classes about music in the Arab world.