Kay Kaufman Shelemay
Harvard University
Kay Kaufman Shelemay is the G. Gordon Watts Research Professor of Music and of African and African American Studies 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 books on musics of Africa and its diaspora include Music, Ritual, and Falasha History (1986; winner of both the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 1987 and the Prize of the International Musicological Society in 1988); A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey (1991); Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant: An Anthology (3 vols., 1993-97, co-authored with Peter Jeffery); and a special 2011 double volume of the journal Diaspora. A Journal of Transnational Studies, titled "Creating the Ethiopian Diaspora," co-edited with Stephen Kaplan. Her most recent book is Sing and Sing On. Sentinel Musicians and the Making of the Ethiopian American Diaspora (2022), which received Honourable Mention for the ICTMD Book Prize and Honorable Mention for the SEM Bruno Nettl Prize. She has published other books in Jewish Studies, including Let Jasmine Rain Down. Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews (1998, Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award), and 3 editions of her textbook, Soundscapes. Exploring Music in a Changing World, soon to be released by W.W. Norton in an all-digital edition. Shelemay has been awarded fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at University of Pennsylvania. A Past-President of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Shelemay in 2012 completed terms as a Congressional Appointee as well as having served as Chair of the Board of Trustees (2002-2004) of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Shelemay has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000), the American Academy of Jewish Research (2004), the American Philosophical Society (2013), and an Associate (Foreign Member) of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences (2014). She held the Chair for Modern Culture at the Library of Congress (2007) and travelled nationally as the Phi Beta Kappa/Frank M. Updike Memorial Scholar (2010-2011).
