Reflections on My Research Among the Ethiopian Jews
Professor Kay Kaufman Shelemay
Jewish Heritage Lecture Series
Weinstein/Minkoff Lecture
Kay Kaufman Shelemay
G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University
Thursday, September 24, 7:00 pm
Pyle Center (702 Langdon Street)
Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s ethnomusicological fieldwork on the music and ritual of the Ethiopian Jews, carried out in their rural villages on the cusp of the Ethiopian revolution and before the community’s immigration to Israel, produced surprising new insights into their history. This lecture explores the distance of more than thirty-five years of that research process, its conclusions, and implications of Professor Shelemay’s recent research for her findings. The lecture will include audio and visual materials.
About the Lecturer
Kay Kaufman Shelemay is the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. An ethnomusicologist who has carried out fieldwork in Ethiopia, Israel, and the U.S., Shelemay received the Prize of the International Musicology Society, the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Post-Doctoral Publication Award for her first book, Music, Ritual, and Falasha History (1986). Her 1998 monograph, Let Jasmine Rain Down. Song and Remembrance Among Syrian Jews, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her recent books and editions include Studies in Jewish Musical Traditions (2001); Soundscapes, Exploring Music in a Changing World, 2nd ed., (2006), and Pain and its Transformations: The Interface of Biology and Culture (co-edited with Sarah Coakley, 2007). She recently concluded a collaborative research project with her Harvard colleague Carol Oja and their Harvard students on Leonard Bernstein’s Boston (published as a special issue of the Journal of the Society for American Music, 2009) and is currently writing a book on music and musicians of the Ethiopian American diaspora.
A member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy for Jewish Research, Shelemay has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. A past president of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Shelemay is a Congressional appointee to and former chair of the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
This lecture is made possible by gifts from the family and friends of the Weinstein/Minkoff families of Madison, Wisconsin.
