Faculty

Philip V. Bohlman is the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities and of Music at the University of Chicago, where he also holds adjunct positions in the Divinity School, Germanic Studies, Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Southern Asian Studies. His teaching and courses cover a broad range, with special interests in music and modernity, folk and popular music in North America and Europe, Jewish music, music of the Middle East and South Asia, music and religion, and music at the encounter with racism and colonialism. A pianist, he is also the Artistic Director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, a Jewish cabaret and Ensemble-in-Residence at the University of Chicago. He has written and published extensively, and among his most recent books are World Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002; translated into five languages), The Music of European Nationalism (ABC-CLIO, 2004; 2nd revised edition, Routledge, 2008), Jüdische Musik – Eine mitteleuropäische Geistesgeschichte (Böhlau, 2005), and Jewish Music and Modernity (AMS Studies in Music, 2008). Among his recent edited volumes are Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago, 2000; with Ronald Radano), Music in American Religious Experience (Oxford, 2006; with Edith Blumhofer and Maria Chow), and Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New (Chicago, 2008).  The New Budapest Orpheum Society has released the CD, Dancing on the Edge of the Volcano (Cedille Records, 2002), and will release So That Their Voices Will Not Fall Silent: Jewish Cabaret in Exile (Cedille) in early 2009. Current book projects include Music Drama of the Holocaust, Herder on Music and Nationalism, and Wie könnten wir des Herrn Lied singen in fremdem Lande? Philip Bohlman was awarded the Edward Dent Medal by the Royal Music Association in 1997, the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin in 2003, and the 2007 Derek Allen Prize for Musicology by the British Academy, to which he was elected as a Corresponding Fellow in 2007.

Office: Goodspeed 211
Phone: (773) 702-0514
E-mail: boh6@uchicago.edu