Faculty Projects & Recent Publications
The Department of Music showcases a dynamic culture of creativity, scholarship, and innovation. Faculty members are actively engaged in a wide range of artistic and academic work, including original compositions, performances, interdisciplinary collaborations, music education research, ethnomusicological studies, and critical scholarship. These projects and publications reflect the department’s commitment to advancing musical knowledge, enriching cultural dialogue, and fostering excellence in both practice and research.
Ongoing Projects
In 2022, Philip V. Bohlman was awarded the International Balzan Prize for Ethnomusicology for "his seminal contribution to ethnomusicology and music research more broadly, and for his work on music and European nationalism, music, race, and the colonial encounter; globalization; the interstices between music and religion; Jewish music in modernity; and the historically informed performance of Jewish urban musics."
As part of this prize, Bohlman has organized two symposia: Borderlands of Sonic Encounter in February 2024 and Unsettled Passage: A US-Mexico Border Symposium on Sonic Encounter in February 2025.
Borderlands of Sonic Encounter (2024) laid the groundwork for rethinking the global soundscapes of the arts and humanities, "embracing interdisciplinarity and redrawing borders between fields. View the full program and speakers here.
Unsettled Passage: A US-Mexico Border Symposium on Sonic Encounter (2025) brought together artists, scholars, and community members to engage with the many forms of sonic encounter afforded by one of the most mediatized borders in contemporary politics: the US-Mexico borderlands. It aimed to collectively reexamine and reimagine some of the musical functions of borderlands: as sites of silence, precarity, and violence; as regions of mediation, passage, and transformation; and as contact zones of possibility and even hope. View the full program and speakers here.
A multiyear, multidisciplinary, international project led collaboratively by Martha Feldman (University of Chicago), Martin Stokes (King’s College London), and Dafni Tragaki (University of Thessaly), Love / Music: Problematics of a Relationship interrogates the highly neglected theoretical, epistemological, disciplinary, and ethnohistorical dimensions of the love / music nexus.
The Love/Music project will stage several public artistic and scholarly events: Oxford Maqam in Thessaloniki in December 2026; a capstone conference in 2027-28 (location TBD); and a traveling exhibition, to be launched in Chicago in fall 2028. During its initial years (2026-27), the project also includes four closed workshops, taking place in Paris, Chicago, and Thessaloniki, that seek to develop its public events and future publications.
Learn more about upcoming events on the Love/Music website.
Photo by Valerie Booth O.
Echoes of Translation: Audibility and Relationality in Indian Jewish Women Songs (Oxford University Press, 2026)
Castrato Phantoms: Moreschi, Fellini, and the Sacred Vernacular in Rome (Princeton University Press, 2026)
What Did You Hear?: The Music of Bob Dylan (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
Biblical Families in Music: Conflict and Heterodoxy in Oratorios, 1670–1770 (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
Island Time: Speed and the Archipelago from St. Kitts and Nevis (University of Chicago Press, 2024)