Leila O. Tayeb is Postdoctoral Associate in Music and Islam in the Contemporary World at Cornell University. Her research centers on performance and politics in Africa and the Middle East with a primary focus in contemporary Libya. Her interests revolve around sound and militarism, political authority in daily life, performance ethnography, questions of indigeneity and race in/and northern Africa, Islam and the state, and state-sponsored performance. She also has a background in dance studies. She received her PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University in 2018.