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Faculty Fellow

Philip V. Bohlman

Ludwig Rosenberger Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish History, Music and the Humanities in the College; Associate Faculty, Divinity School University of Chicago

Biography

Phil Bohlman’s teaching and research draw upon diverse methods and perspectives in music scholarship to forge an ethnomusicology built upon foundations in ethnography, history, and performance. He is particularly interested in exploring the interstices between music and religion, music, race, and colonial encounter, and music and nationalism. The study of Jewish music in modernity has provided a primary focus for his research for four decades, and since 1998 has provided the context for his activities as a performer, both as the Artistic Director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society (a Jewish cabaret and ensemble-in-residence at the Humanities Division), and in stage performances with Christine Wilkie Bohlman (the College) of works for piano and dramatic speaker created during the Holocaust.

To learn more about Bohlman’s research and publications, please visit his profile page at the Department of Music.

Featured Project

Audio Cultures of India: New Approaches to the Performance Archive

2013 – 2014

Projects

Interwoven: Sonic and Visual Histories of the Indian Ocean World

Interwoven: Sonic and Visual Histories of the Indian Ocean World

This project explored the historical significance of South Asian artistic practices and the complex ways they helped shape local and transregional cultures.

Interwoven lays the foundations of a new paradigm for understanding movement, practice, materiality, and embodiment as constituting factors of social relations across long temporal arcs and geographic itineraries unbounded by national borders in the Indian Ocean region. The project...