Sophia M. Enríquez (she/her/ella) works at the intersections of Latinx, Appalachian, and Southern music, migration, and regional culture. She is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Music at Duke University where she also teaches in the Program for Latino/a Studies in the Global South. Sophia earned her PhD in ethnomusicology at Ohio State University as well as graduate certificates in folklore and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality studies. Her monograph in progress, tentatively titled "Canciones de Los Apalaches: Latinx Music, Migration, and Belonging in Appalachia" is the first full-length study of Latinx creative practices in the Appalachian region and shows how longstanding narratives of Appalachia as a monolith have obscured the movement of Latinx people to and through the region over the past century.
Sophia is passionate about community-engaged scholarship and has worked on several public folklore projects across the Appalachian region and the South. She is also a practitioner of both Mexican and Appalachian folk music. Sophia performs with the Lua Project, a Mexican-Appalachian fusion band in Charlottesville, Virginia, and recently co-founded Son de Carolina, a Durham, NC-based collective dedicated to the study of the Mexican folk music tradition son jarocho.