Kay Kaufman Shelemay
G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies
Address:
Harvard University
Department of Music
Music Building, North Yard
Cambridge, MA 02138
Phone: 617.495.4008
Fax: 617.496.8081
Email: shelemay@fas.
Courses | Biography | Recent Publications | Curriculum Vitae
Courses
Literature and Arts B-78. Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World
Music 194rs. Topics in Music from 1800 to Present: Proseminar
[Music 206r. Research Methods in Ethnomusicology: Musical Ethnography]
Music 208r. Ethnomusicology: Seminar
Biography
Kay Kaufman Shelemay is the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music at Harvard University and a former Chair of the Department of Music. An ethnomusicologist specializing in musics of Africa, the Middle East, and the urban United States, she received her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Michigan.
The author of numerous articles and reviews, Shelemay's book Music, Ritual, and Falasha History (1986), won both the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 1987 and the Prize of the International Musicological Society in 1988. Other major publications include A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey (1991); Ethiopian Christian Chant: An Anthology (3 vols., 1993Â-97 ), co-authored with Peter Jeffery; and Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance Among Syrian Jews , University of Chicago Press, 1998 (finalist for the National Jewish Book Award). She edited the seven-volume Garland Library of Readings in Ethnomusicology , (Garland Publishing 1990). She also edited Studies in Jewish Musical Traditions in 2001 and co-edited Pain and its Transformations: The Interface of Biology and Culture (with Sarah Coakley) forthcoming from Harvard University Press. The second edition of her textbook, Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World , was published by W.W. Norton in 2006. Shelemay is currently writing a book on Ethiopian music and musicians in the United States based on musical ethnography in Washington,D.C. and Boston.
Shelemay was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has been awarded a number of major postdoctoral fellowships, including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Radcliffe Institute. She is Past-President of the Society for Ethnomusicology and is is a congressional appointee and former chair of the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Shelemay was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000 and was named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for 2001Â-2002 at Harvard. During 2007, she will hold the Chair for Modern Culture at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress.
Before joining the Harvard faculty in 1992, Shelemay taught at Columbia University, where she received an award for distinguished teaching, at New York University, and at Wesleyan University. She received both the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize and the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize at Harvard in 2006.
Recent Publications
Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World, 2nd revised edition (W.W. Norton, 2nd revised edition, forthcoming, spring 2006)