[AMS-announce] ANNOUNCEMENT: Kay Kaufman Shelemay Appointed Chair of Modern Culture at the John W. Kluge Center (Library of Congress)

[ams-announce-admin at list.bowdoin.edu]

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has appointed Kay Kaufman 
Shelemay, an ethnomusicologist from Harvard University, to the Chair 
of Modern Culture in the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of 
Congress. While in residence, Shelemay will pursue research for a 
book on Ethiopian music and musicians in the United States.

At Harvard University, Shelemay is the G. Gordon Watts Professor of 
Music, the former chair of the Department of Music and a professor in 
the African and African American Studies Department. Shelemay 
specializes in the music 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" (1993-1997), co-authored with Peter Jeffery; and "Let 
Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance Among Syrian Jews," a 
finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.  She edited the 
seven-volume "Arland Library of Readings in Ethnomusicology" and 
"Studies in Jewish Musical Traditions," and co-edited "Pain and Its 
Transformations: The Interface of Biology and Culture" with Sarah 
Coakley, which is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in fall 
2007.  The second edition of her textbook "Soundscapes: Exploring 
Music in a Changing World" was published by W.W. Norton in 2006.

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 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 2001-2002 at Harvard.

Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of 
Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the 
world's best thinkers to stimulate, energize and distill wisdom from 
the Library's rich resources and to interact with policy-makers in 
Washington. For more information on fellowships, grants and programs, 
visit www.loc.gov/kluge.