Participants

Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy is a visiting faculty member and research associate in the Department of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her M.Mus. in voice at Yale University, and her Ph.D. dissertation at Brown University concerned the sacred classical music of Tamilnadu. Her research, writing, teaching, curatorial activities, and multi-media publications often have an applied focus, aimed at community development of minority traditions, especially in diasporic settings. She served as curator and presented the first of many concert and lecture tour outside India with Sidi Goma, a group of African-Indian Sidi performers from Gujarat, traveling with them in England and Wales in September 2002. Her most recent publications include Sidi Sufis: African Indian Mystics of Gujarat (Apsara Media 2002: 79-minute CD), the volume co-edited with Indian Ocean historian Edward Alpers, Sidis and Scholars: Essays on African Indians (New Delhi: Rainbow Publications, 2003), and two DVDs: From Africa to India: Sidi Music in the Indian Ocean Diaspora (Apsara Media 2003, 79 minutes) and The Sidi Malunga Project: Rejuvenating the African Musical Bow in India (Apsara Media, 2004, 47 minutes).

James Chopyak is an ethnomusicologist and Professor of Music at the California State University, Sacramento, where he has taught since 1987. In addition to his teaching he has served on numerous University committees and has been the President of the CSU Sacramento Chapter of the California Faculty Association. He also is actively involved in organizing and promoting world music events at CSUS. His formal studies include Lehigh University, the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Columbia University in the City of New York. Jim was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malaysia in the 1970s. In total he has spent nearly 9 years living in Malaysia and in Singapore while working as a music educator and performer (on French horn) and researcher. He has conducted research projects on Music, Mass Media and Islam in Malaysia over a long period of time and has presented papers at several international conferences and published several articles as a result of this work.

Wendy Dunleavy is currently an independent scholar. She received her PhD from SOAS in 2005, for her thesis “Munshidat: Female Sufi Performance in Egypt”, concerning contemporary female performance in the ritual and celebratory contexts of popular religious and life cycle festivities in the Delta region of Lower Egypt and in Cairo. Her work to date has focussed on the practice and repertoire of munshidat, relating them specifically to issues effecting female performance in this increasingly Islamic and conservative society. Furthermore it highlights the controversy that surrounds these performers, the denial of their existence by some, and the measures taken by them to legitimise themselves in their profession.

Jonathan Ervine is a lecturer in French at Bangor University. Much of his research and teaching focuses primarily on cultural representations of immigrant groups in France, in both popular music and contemporary cinema. He is currently doing research on the use of new media technologies by minority artists in France. This has included how Lil’ Maaz sought to express his Turkish and Muslim identity in his 2007 rap video Mange du Kebab, and its focus on food as an important cultural symbol for Muslim diasporas. He has published articles on the politically-engaged music of French pop group Zebda, contemporary political cinema in France, anti-war cinema and political reactions to France’s 1998 football World Cup victory.

Michael Frishkopf is an ethnomusicologist specializing in sounds of the Arab world, West Africa, and Islamic ritual. His research also includes social network analysis and digital multimedia repositories. He currently works at the University of Alberta, as Associate Professor in the Department of Music, Associate Director of the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology, and Associate Director for Multimedia at FolkwaysAlive.

Maruta Herding has been a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Cambridge since 2007, where she is supervised by Göran Therborn. Her PhD project on Islamic youth culture in western Europe looks at a recent phenomenon that has shaped both European Islam and the subcultural landscape of France, Germany and the UK: Young Muslims are combining western subcultural forms such as hip hop, street wear or graffiti art with Islamic contents to express their faith in an unorthodox way, while the ‘cool’ appearance, however, does not hide the rather conservative values of this trend. During her PhD, Maruta is funded by the ESRC, and her college, Girton, has supported her fieldwork. Before coming to Cambridge, Maruta studied sociology and philosophy at undergraduate and graduate level at the University of Freiburg, Germany, from where she graduated in 2007. When writing her MA thesis, she spent several months in Paris, as she worked on the 2005 riots in French suburbs as a case study of segregation and urban conflict. In 2004-2005 she studied abroad for a year at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, doing a graduate diploma in Middle East Studies and learning Arabic.

Tom Hodgson is a DPhil candidate in Music at Oxford University, under the supervision of Martin Stokes. Specialising in Ethnomusicology his research focuses on Bradford’s Pakistani-Muslim community, exploring issues of religion, identity, politics, migration and memory, and how these are articulated and negotiated through music – particularly since 9/11. He has taught on the Introducing Indian Music module at Newcastle University, where he also completed an MLitt in Music in 2008. His research, since undergraduate level, has centred on music and Bradford’s Pakistani-Muslim community. He initially focused on broad issues of musical syncretism and hybridity in Bhangra, but then became more interested in specific political events and the effect they had on the community. One example of this was a large study looking at the Rushdie affair of 1989. His masters dissertation attempted to deconstruct the community’s vociferous reaction to Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’. It did this by comparing the narrative of the novel with the narrative of Bhangra Rap group Fun-Da-Mental’s song ‘Countryman’; highlighting their similarities. He then subsequently suggested that the political platform created by the community via their demonstrations opened up the sociological space for Fun-Da-Mental to write their music. In a sense, therefore, music was used as a tool by the 2nd generation to counter Rushdie’s version of history and articulate their own (imagined) experience of migration and the metamporphic processes therein. His current research attempts to bring some of these ideas up-to-date. Keeping with the chronology, he is now looking at the profound ways in which the events of September 11th 2001 affect Muslims living in the UK.

Mona Khedr holds an MA in the semiotics and textual analysis of drama from the University of Tanta, Egypt where she teaches English language and literature. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Flinders University of Adelaide, South Australia. Her forthcoming thesis, “Negotiating Muslim Identity on Egyptian, Australian and Malaysian Stages” is a comparative study focusing on the nuances of representing an Islamic identity on the stage across these three cultures. Mona’s academic interests include semiology of theatre and drama, translation and interpreting, religious studies and interculturalism in art and literature. Some of her research/translation featured in Ecumenica: Journal of Theatre and Performance (1.2, 2008) and African Theatre Journal (8, Diasporas, 2009).

Nadia Kiwan is Lecturer in the School of Language & Literature at the University of Aberdeen. Her research interests focus on contemporary French and Francophone cultures and societies. Particularly interested in migration, identity, new social movements, new forms of migrant cultural production and citizenship. Her current research funded project is: “Diaspora as Social and Cultural practice: a Study of Transnational Networks across Europe and Africa” – awarded by AHRC programme ‘Diaspora, Migration and Identity’ (with Professor Ulrike H. Meinhof, University of Southampton). This project focuses on the ways in which (post-)migrant cultural practitioners, performers, and musicians originating from North-Africa and Madagascar are able to use multiple translocal and transnational networks across African, European and wider global spaces. It suggests that artists who create or enter such networks make use of, but go far beyond the traditional ‘bi-focal’, ethnically and spatially defined communities that link originating and sending countries, as studied in much Diaspora research. The research marks a key development in the empirical study of networks, by investigating links between migrant cultural practitioners which develop outside of established cultural/historical ties.

Tony Langlois was lecturer in Ethnomusicology at University College Cork. He is now lecturer Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. He gained his PhD in 1997 at Queen’s University, Belfast, with a thesis on Algerian and Moroccan Rai Music. His published articles include work on North African popular and ritual musics, and ‘Rave’ culture in the UK. Tony Langlois has taught Ethnomusicology and Anthropology at Queen’s University and Trinity College, Dublin. He has also taught Cultural Studies for the Open University in Ireland and worked with the Cultural Diversity Programme of the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council. He was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Ulster in 2003, working initially in Media Studies before transferring to the Music Division in 2006.

Jane Lewisohn completed her undergraduate work in Iranian Studies at Pahlavi University in Shiraz, Iran in the 1970s. For the past 30 years, she has been involved in both the public and private sectors with the Persian community in the U.S.A. and Europe, translating and editing books and organizing various charitable events. Most recently, she conducted a major research project funded by the British Library ‘Endangered Archives Project’, collecting and digitalizing all the Golha Radio programs broadcast on Iranian radio from 1956 through 1979. She is presently a Research Associate at the Department of Music at SOAS, University of London. She also heads the Golha project, which aims to make the Golha Archive and its related research available to the wider academic and Persian community.

David Lewis is Reader in Social Policy at the London School of Economics, where he has specialised in research on issues of rural change, development policy and civil society in Bangladesh. An anthropologist by background, he is also co-author with Katy Gardner of Anthropology, Development and the Postmodern Challenge (Pluto, 1996) and co-editor with David Mosse of Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Development (Kumarian, 2006). He is currently completing a two year ESRC-funded research project on the life histories of boundary crossers between state and civil society.

Daniela Merolla is Senior Lecturer in African Literatures at the Department of Languages and Cultures of Africa, University of Leiden. Her specialization in African oral and written literatures has allowed her to publish and teach courses in anthropological and literary approaches to gender, ethnicity, narrativity and new media in Africa. African immigrant artistic productions in Europe is also a major theme of her work. Her most recent books are De l’art de la narration tamazight (berbère). 200 ans d’études: état des lieux et perspectives (Paris--Louvain--Dudley MA: Peeters, 2006) and, edited together with Sandra Ponzanesi, Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe (Lanham MD: Lexington 2005). She is preparing two special journal issues ("Myth: Theory and the Disciplines, Religion -Elsevier; and "Creation Myths and the Visual Arts: An Ongoing Dialogue between Word and Image"- Religion and the Art - Brill) and the forthcoming book Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe (Rodopi, Amsterdam) edited together with Elisabeth Bekers and Sissy Helff.

Gita Mohan holds a Masters in English Literature from the University of Madras, India and a Masters in Translating (French/English) from the University of Salford, U.K. She has completed a PhD in Postcolonial, Francophone Studies at the University of Salford. Her comparative thesis deals with the quest for self-identity in Postcolonial Indian Anglophone and Maghrebian Francophone literature. She has presented academic papers at conferences the U.K, the USA, Ireland, Tunisia, India and Egypt. She has interest in music and performance of India and North Africa and is currently investigating Tanoura of Egypt and popular music of North Africa for the purpose of this project.

Dhiraj Murthy completed a PhD in sociology at the University of Cambridge on Asian electronic music in the UK and South Asia. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bowdoin College, Maine, in 2008.

John O’Connell is a graduate of Oxford University, the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and the University of California (Los Angeles) where he completed his PhD in ethnomusicology on Turkish music. He has taught ethnomusicology at Otago University and the University of Limerick, having held a number of visiting positions at The Queen's University of Belfast and Brown University, amongst others. His publications concern in principle the musical traditions of the Islamic world. He is co-editor of Music in Conflict: Ethnomusicological Perspectives (Illinois UP, forthcoming 2008) and author of many articles on Middle Eastern topics. He is at present completing a book on the alaturka phenomenon in Turkey and publishing a monograph on the madôh tradition in Tajikistan. His research interests also include the traditional musics of Europe and he is currently editing a collection of relevant essays for Scarecrow Press concerning the place of ethnomusicology in different European nation states. Dr O'Connell has acted as a music consultant for a number of international organizations, being awarded a Senior Fulbright Fellowship in association with the Aga Khan Foundation (2002) and a Getty Foundation Grant to participate in its International Summer Institute (2006). He has hosted a variety of international conferences including the 15th ICTM Colloquium (2004) and the International Symposium in European Ethnomusicology (2007). In was recently appointed Reviews Editor of Ethnomusicology.

Anne Rasmussen is Associate Professor of Music and Ethnomusicology at The College of William and Mary where she also directs The William and Mary Middle Eastern Music Ensemble, and serves as chair of the Middle East Studies Faculty. She has published widely on American musical multiculturalism, music and culture in the Middle East, and Islamic musical arts in Indonesia. She is contributing co-editor of Musics of Multicultural America(Schirmer 1997) and her articles appear in the journals Ethnomusicology, Asian Music, Popular Music, American Music, the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, The World of Music, and the Harvard Dictionary of Music and she has contributed chapters to a number of edited volumes. She has also produced four compact disc recordings documenting immigrant and community music in the United States. Rasmussen’s book Women’s Voices, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Musical Arts in Indonesia is based on nearly two years of ethnographic research in Indonesia and is forthcoming with the University of California Press. She is a former Fulbright senior scholar, has served as the First Vice President of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and is the recipient of a Phi Beta Kappa award for excellence in teaching as well as the Jaap Kunst Prize in 2001 for the best article published in the field of ethnomusicology.

Mohammed Ali Rizvi has gained his education in the UK. He is in his final year studies in Islamic studies at the University of Leeds. He has also spent some years at an Islamic Seminary studying the sciences of Qur’an, Hadith and Fiqh literature and has attended a course on Biblical study with the late Shaikh Ahmad Deedat and holds interest world religions and Universal perennial and Spirituality. He has also recently completed his book The Wahhabi Reality, to be published soon, and his forthcoming studies and titles include: The Essence of Tawheed, The Complete Beginners Guide to Qur’anic recitation, The Complete Beginners Guide to Salah and Nanak Shah; and The Legacy of the Muslim Nanak. MohammedAli Rizvi also has interest in Sufism and its relation with world spiritualities and the place of Music within mysticism. He has sound knowledge of Islam and has special interest in Islamic belief systems and sects in Islam. He is also the director of the Muslim Society of Leeds (MSL) and the founder of Leeds Muslim College (LMC) for the furtherance of specialist studies in theological and religious studies. The society’s website address is: www.muslimsocietyofleeds.org.uk

Ruba Salih is Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. Her research interests and writing cover the broad areas of gender, Islam and modernity in the Middle East and Europe, transnational migration and gender across the Mediterranean, multiculturalism and citizenship; Gender, Islam and the public sphere; Islam in Europe. She is currently working on an edited thematic issue on “Muslim women” in Europe: Bodily Performances, Multiple Belongings and the Public Sphere” (together with Annelies Moors, University of Amsterdam), which will be published in the journal Social Anthropology in 2009. She is also involved in a new European research network funded under the Framework VII of the European Commission. The research is on Gender, Migration and Cultural Interactions in the Mediterranean and Southern Europe, and she will be investigating more specifically migrant women and the performance of religious identities in the diaspora and the emergence of new gendered social movements (2008-2011). Another current line of research concerns the Palestinian diaspora and its transnational networks. She is particularly interested in gendered constructions and practices of be-longing and trans-national citizenship and the emergence and political mobilization of Palestinian women in the diaspora.

Natalie Sarrazin received her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland, College Park with a research focus on South Asian music. Her dissertation Singing in Tejaji’s Temple explores trance music, healing and ritual performance in Rajasthan Natalie holds an MMEd degree in Music Education from Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University. For five years she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Virginia where she developed courses on music in Islam and the Music of Indian Cinema, and was an Asian Religion and Cultures Department Fellow at Stanford University. Currently, Natalie is Assistant Professor of Music at SUNY College at Brockport teaching courses in music in the Theatre and Arts for Children interdisciplinary program. Natalie’s research focuses on the music of the Indian film industry. Recent publications include “Celluloid Love Songs: Musical Modus Operandi and the Dramatic Aesthetics of Romantic Hindi Film” Popular Music Journal, forthcoming, October, 2008 and “Songs from the Heart: On Musical Coding, Sentiment and Heart in Indian Popular Film Music” forthcoming in Global Bollywood, New York University Press, 2008. She also recently published a book entitled Indian Music for the Classroom, a Rowman and Littlefield, MENC publication, 2008.

Qasim Riza Shaheen is an artist based in Manchester, UK. His work has been programmed widely including at The National Review of Live Art, Glasgow; Liverpool Biennial; Port City & Breathing Space at Arnolfini in Bristol; Castlefield Gallery in Manchester; Alhamra Gallery in Lahore, Pakistan where he has recently completed a residency with the National College of Arts. He is currently Associate Artist at the Green Room in Manchester, Associate Professor at National College of Arts, Pakistan, and the founder/artistic director of Anokha Laadla, a live art company based in the UK.

Razia Sultanova was a research fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is now Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. She received her BA and MMus degrees from the Uzbek State Conservatory and PhD from the Moscow State Conservatory. Her primary areas of research interest are Central Asian and Middle Eastern music, Islam and music, and gender and music. She has published extensively in several languages (English, French, German, Russian and Uzbek) and is the author of two major books, Woman, Islam and Music in Central Asian (IB Tauris, London/New-York, 2008) and Music of the Turkic Speaking World (Humbold University, Berlin, 2008)

Hae-kyung Um is a Lecturer in Music (University of Liverpool). Musical training at Seoul National University. PhD in Anthropology and Ethnomusicology from Queen’s University Belfast. She held fellowships in the UK and Holland that took her to Central Asia, Russia and China. Her research areas include the classical, folk and popular performing arts of Asia with a focus on tradition in modernity, diaspora, intercultural performance and identity. She edited and contributed to Diasporas and Interculturalism in Asian Performing Arts (RoutledgeCurzon, 2005) and is currently preparing a monograph on Korean p’ansori musical drama. She is also a kayagûm zither player, samul nori percussionist and kagok singer.

Karin van Nieuwkerk is anthropologist and senior research of Anthropology of the Middle East at Radboud University, the Netherlands and, most recently, editor of Women Embracing Islam: Gender and Conversion in the West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). Senior Researcher Department Languages and Cultures of the Middle East. Her other key publications are Women Embracing Islam. Gender and Conversion in the West. Karin van Nieuwkerk (ed). Austin: University of Texas Press; “Credits for the hereafter. Changing ways to collect religious merit, ajr, among Moroccan immigrant women in the Netherlands” in: The Dutch and their Gods. Secularization and transformation of religion in the Netherlands since 1950. Erik Sengers (ed.) Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren; “Time and Migration: Changes in Religious Celebrations among Moroccan Immigrant Women in the Netherlands” in Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 25(3): 385-39; “Veils and Wooden Clogs don’t go Together” Ethnos Journal of Anthropology 69(2): 229-247; “Religion, Gender, and Performing: Female Performers and Repentance in Egypt”. In: Music and Gender. Perspectives from the Mediterranean. Tullia Magrini (ed.) Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Richard Kent Wolf, (Professor). An ethnomusicologist who has devoted his career to the interdisciplinary study of South Asian musical traditions, Richard K. Wolf has written broadly about classical, folk and tribal musical traditions in South India as well as on musical traditions associated with Shi'ism and Sufism in North India and Pakistan. Since his first study visit to India in 1982, Wolf has lived and conducted research in South Asia for seven-and-a-half years. More recently, Wolf’s interest in South Asia has expanded westward into Iran, and his work has concerned sociomusical processes that transcend the borders of South Asia. This is reflected in his edited volume, Theorizing the Local: Music, Practice, and Experience in South Asia and Beyond (Oxford University Press, New York: 2009) (www.oup.com/us/theorizingthelocal). Wolf is also the author of the book The Black Cow's Footprint: Time, Space, and Music in the Lives of the Kotas of South India (Permanent Black, 2005 and University of Illinois Press, 2006), which was awarded the Edward Cameron Dimock, Jr. Prize in the Humanities. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including recently those of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. In addition to writing and teaching, Wolf also performs on the South Indian vina; his is a disciple of Ranganayaki Rajagopalan, a renowned vina player in the Karaikkudi style. Wolf is currently Professor of Music at Harvard University.

Project Assistants

Nicola Dash is coordinating interviews with artists and practitioners on behalf of this project. She is also working towards the elaboration of typology of music and Islam for the purpose of this project. Nicola Dach is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Kamal Salhi. She is researching the representation of religion and religiosity in the literature of three major North African women authors of French expression. She has been the holder of three fellowships, one of which for study abroad in her area of research, North Africa; all of which have allowed her to acquire a sound foundation in Islamic studies. She has also done work on the relationship of music to literature, as in her paper “Women of Algiers: Music as a Strategy of Sublimating Post-Independence Trauma”, given at the UIUC graduate conference in March 2007. She also presented a paper on the relationship between popular music and postcolonial theory at the University of Illinois’s symposium in April 2008, “L’’après’ et l’’anti’: Visions du postcolonial dans la musique populaire francophone”. Nicola is also the host of the weekly radio show “Francophiliacs” on local radio station WEFT 90.1 FM (www.francophiliacs.org). The show presents music from the francophone world, as well as francophone-related news and events. It also periodically features interviews with artists and experts on francophone music from specific areas. In the future, she hopes to combine her research in religious studies with her interest in music and investigate the interaction between the two, as well as hoping to expand and put to good use her contacts in the music world.

Alexandra Richardson is responsible for the recording and note-taking the workshops and offers general assistance during the workshop activity. She is completing a degree in music at Huddersfield University, and has embarked on a research project based on Sufi music; (in particular Moroccan Sufi music) and the social/political factors as a continuous debate in Islam. Comparatively, she is researching Sufi music in England and Sufi music in Morocco.

Jasjit Singh is responsible for the website design. He is a PhD student in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Leeds. He is supervised by Professor Kim Knott and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Religion and Society Programme). He is looking at questions such as: What understanding do Sikhs in the age range 18-30 have of Sikhism? What sources of authority do they draw on, and how have their acquired their knowledge of Sikh tradition, belief and practice? Why is it that young Sikhs appear to be more aware of religion than their parents? The research will involve collaboration with the Bradford Educational and Cultural Association of Sikhs (BECAS), which began some 25 years ago to oversee the educational interests of Sikh children and young people.