Dr. Daniel T. Neely

I am an ethnomusicologist with a specialty in Jamaican music.  I have also written about ice cream truck music and am currently thinking through a project about music and humor.  To contact me, click on the flying monkey king in the left margin or email me at daniel.neely ( at ) nyu.edu.



Since 1998, I have studied a genre of traditional Jamaican music called mento through New York University.  In November 2007, I defended my dissertation Mento, Jamaica's Original Music: Development, Tourism and the Nationalist Frame.  For more about my research, click on the canine at the dogtrols at right.

If you're interested in reading my dissertation, it is available for order through ProQuest.  Armed with the following citation, you will find it shockingly easy to get:

"Mento, Jamaica's original music": Development, tourism and the nationalist frame.
by Neely, Daniel Tannehill Ph.D., New York University, 2007, 413 pages; AAT 3310562

If you are affiliated with an institution that subscribes to ProQuest (say, a college or university), you can simply obtain a copy through your library's ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Database.  If you have no institutional affiliation and thus no access to ProQuest's Dissertations & Theses Database, you can order a copy through ProQuest's Dissertation Express service.  (I find the diss is easiest to access using the catalogue number, which is 3310562.) 

Since 2000, I have played tenor banjo in the Washington Square Harp and Shamrock Orchestra.  To visit our MySpace page (where you can hear what we sound like), click the harp and shamrock.


I currently work at the ARChive of Contemporary Music and am the Director of the New York Music Index and Archive [NYMIA].  The ARChive is the largest popular music archive in the world.  To read our blog, click the marching band.