| 1 | Name: | Dr. Kay Kaufman Shelemay | |
| Institution: | Harvard University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2013 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 401. Archaeology | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1948 | ||
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 received her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Michigan (1977), Shelemay has carried out ethnographic and historical research in Ethiopia and among a cross-section of musical communities in the United States. Shelemay’s first book, Music, Ritual, and Falasha History (1986), won both the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 1987 and the Prize of the International Musicological Society in 1988. Among her other books are A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey (1991); Ethiopian Christian Chant: An Anthology (3 vols., 1993-97), co-authored with Peter Jeffery; Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance Among Syrian Jews (1998); Sing and Sing On. Sentinel Musicians and the Making of the Ethiopian American Diaspora (2022) and the textbook Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World (3rd ed., 2015). Shelemay has also edited a seven-volume series of readings in ethnomusicology and other collections of essays, including Pain and Its Transformations: The Interface of Biology and Culture (2007, co-edited with Sarah Coakley) and Creating the Ethiopian Diaspora, a special double volume of Diaspora, A Journal of Transnational Studies (2011, co-edited with Steven Kaplan). Among her numerous articles, "The Power of Silent Voices. Women in the Syrian Jewish Musical Tradition" won the Society of Ethnomusicology’s 2010 Jaap Kunst for best article of the year. Shelemay has been awarded fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. A Past-President of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Shelemay was a Congressional appointee to the Board of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress from 1999-2012. In 2000, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2004, a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Shelemay was named the Chair for Modern Culture at the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress during 2007-2008, and served as the Phi Beta Kappa/Frank M. Updike Memorial Scholar during 2010-2011. Kay Kaufman Shelemay was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2013. | |||