Shelemay, Kay Kaufman

Kay Kaufman Shelemay is Professor of Music at Harvard University and currently Chair of the Department of Music. An ethnomusicologist with specializations in musics of Africa, the Middle East, and urban United States, she received her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Michigan in 1977.

The author of numerous publications, Professor Shelemay's 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. Her book A Song of Longing : An Ethiopian Journey (1991) details her years abroad as well as the unanticipated impact that the encroaching Ethiopian Revolution had on her life and research goals. Together with Ethiopian Christian Chant : An Anthology (3 vols., 1993-1997) co-authored with Peter Jeffery, these books serve to complement the materials found in the Kay Kaufman Shelemay Collection of Ethiopian Music, at Harvard.

Following a year's appointment as Visiting Research Scholar at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she moved to Ethiopia in 1973. There, as Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, Shelemay carried out her dissertation and related research until 1975. Her fieldwork on the liturgy and religious practice of the Beta Israel (Falasha) was conducted primarily in the northern rural villages around Gondar from 1973-1974 and, of necessity, was redirected to Addis Ababa from 1974-1975 as the country found itself in the throes of Revolution. It was in Addis Ababa that she focused her research on the Ethiopian Christian liturgy, and it is the fruits of this latter study which form the core of the Collection.

Shelemay was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has been awarded several postdoctoral fellowships, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. She is President of the Society for Ethnomusicology and has edited the seven-volume Library of Readings in Ethnomusicology, issued by Garland Publishing in 1990`. Prior to her appointment at Harvard in 1992, Shelemay taught at Columbia, New York, and Wesleyan Universities.