Marissa Moorman is a historian of southern Africa. Her research focuses on the intersection between politics and culture in colonial and independent Angola. Her book Intonations (Ohio University Press, 2008) explores how music was a practice in and through which Angolans living under extreme political repression imagined the nation and how the particularities of music and historical moment cast this process in gendered terms. She is interested in the ways that cultural practice is productive of politics and not just derivative of it.