Personal information
Verified email addresses
Verified email domains
Biography
Ádám Havas is a sociologist and International Fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (KWI), where his research explores the connections between popular music, globalization, and migration. His postdoctoral research as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Barcelona, Department of Sociology (2022-2024) explored the cultural politics of musical diasporas in Europe with particular emphasis on of musicians with Afro-Latin, Black British and Gypsy/Romani backgrounds. Before joining CECUPS, he was Head of Social Science Division at the Budapest-based Milestone Institute, a college of advanced studies. He was Chair of IASPM-Hungary (2018–2020) and is currently a member of IASPM-AL, the editorial board at Jazz Research Journal (Equinox) and Replika social science quarterly. He co-edited with Bruce Johnson a special issue at Popular Music and Society on global jazz diasporas and co-edits (alongside Johnson and David Horn) the Routledge Companion to Diasporic Jazz Studies. His book, The Genesis and Structure of the Hungarian Jazz Diaspora was published in 2022 by Routledge. His publications appeared in Popular Music, Jazz Research Journal and Jazz Research News among others. He gave guest lectures in various universities and research centres including The New School of Social Research, Rutgers University, University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, or, Birmingham City University. In 2019 he was the recipient of the Ferenc Erdei Price awarded to the most outstanding young sociologist of the year in Hungary.
Adam is a keen advocate for the cause of academic autonomy and for a global perspective on structural inequalities and social change.
Endorsement for the Routledge book:
"What a complex, brilliant little book! It’s best to read it as
• a tour de force in the ethnography of performing arts, putting the field of jazz in Hungary on the map of the social sciences world-wide,
• a courageous renewal of the Bourdieusian dialect of sociology, from the sidelines of European bourgeois modernity,
• an ethnography of the place of ‘race’ and identity as they appear in the cosmos of the creative arts, and dance in the double bind of Dirty Whiteness and (dis)privilege,
• an insider-outsider take on the whirl of radically open-ended art,
• an account of creative lives that vibrate between bebop inspirations and the “burden of free idioms”, negotiating the all-important informal scripts played in the “Roma” and “assimilated Jewish” scenes, and
• a sparkling allegory for semiperipheral east-central Europe, a tiny universe of its own, forever in search of a sound—finding a voice that it can regard as its own."
József Böröcz, Professor of Sociology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA
PUBLICATIONS (SELECTION)
Ádám Havas, Bruce Johnson and David Horn, eds. (2025): The Routledge Companion to Diasporic Jazz Studies. New York: Routledge.
Havas, Ádám (2025): “Diasporic Jazz and Identity Politics: Reflections from the European Periphery.” In Havas, Ádám, Bruce Johnson and David Horn, eds., The Routledge Companion to Diasporic Jazz Studies. New York: Routledge, 59-71.
Havas, Ádám (2022): The Genesis and Structure of the Hungarian Jazz Diaspora. New York: Routledge, 198 pages. Shortlisted for IASPM 2023 Book Prize
Havas, Ádám (2022): “Zur Dekonstruktion hegemonialer Jazz-Narrative. Die Rolle von Roma-Musikern bei der Artikulation einer osteuropäischen Differenz”. Darmstädter Beiträge zur Jazzforschung vol. 17 “ROOTS_HEIMAT. Diversity in Jazz”. (Transl. by Wolfram Kneuer). Wolfram Kneuer, ed., 107-23.
Bruce Johnson and Adam Havas (2022): “Western Bias, Canonicity, and Cultural Globalization: Introduction to ‘Jazz Diasporas’”. Popular Music and Society, 371-76.
Havas, Ádám (2020): “The Logic of Distinctions in the Hungarian Jazz Field: A Case Study”. Popular Music 39(3-4), 619-35.
Havas, Ádám (2020): “The Rise of the Heteronomous Academy on the EU’s Boarderlands”. LeftEast, 19 August, 2020.
Activities
Employment (5)
Education and qualifications (2)
Professional activities (7)
Funding (1)
Works (16)
10.4324/9781003212638-8
2-s2.0-85052074784
2-s2.0-85025458014