Soundscapes

Kay Kaufman Shelemay (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music at Harvard University and has taught at Columbia, NYU, and Wesleyan. A Fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, she is a Past President of the Society for Ethnomusicology. She has received fellowships from numerous institutions, including the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Shelemay’s research interests include musical ethnography, music and memory, and Ethiopian music and musicians in their North American diaspora. She is the author of nine books and editions, including Music, Ritual, and Falasha History, which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award and the Prize of the International Musicological Society. An outstanding teacher, Shelemay received an Award for Distinguished Teaching from the Columbia University School of General Studies in 1982, the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize and the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize at Harvard in 2006, and, in 2014, the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award at Harvard. In 2014, Shelemay was elected an Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences.