Julia Banzi received her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from University of California, Santa Barbara. She is especially interested in constructing historical ethnographies – that is seeking ways to understand how the past influences and shapes present musical changes.

The two main geographic areas she explores are North Africa and Spain. Her special interest is the melding of varied cultures and religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) converging in Al–Andalus (711-1492). In Morocco, her focus is on women's Andalusian ensembles. In Spain, she focuses on the flamenco guitar tradition and the processes of when, why, and how performance traditions become obsolete.

Co-artistic director of the international performance ensemble Al-Andalus (www.Andalus.com), artist, composer and one of a very few female flamenco guitarists worldwide, her work reflects her over twenty years of living, studying and performing in North Africa and Spain. Julia is a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar who teaches at Reed College and is honored and excited to visit Syracuse University for the very first time.
Email: music@andalus.com
Website: www.andalus.com

Judith Becker received her degrees in Music and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She is an authority on the music of Southeast Asia. She is a co-founder of the Center for World Performance Studies and was its first director. She also served as director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies for six years. For most of her years at the University of Michigan, she has been director of the University gamelan ensemble, which she helped to establish in 1967. She has written numerous articles, and is the author of three books, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion and Trancing, Traditional Music in Modern Java and Gamelan Stories: Tantrism, Islam and Aesthetic in Central Java. She is the editor of Art, Ritual and Society in Indonesia and the three-volume set of translations entitled Karawitan: Source Readings in Javanese Gamelan and Vocal Music. These three volumes are the first substantial set of translations ever made of musical works written by Southeast Asian scholars and musicians.

Professor Becker has conducted fieldwork in Myanmar (Burma), Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka. Currently, her interest is in the relationship between music and religious ecstasy across cultures. She is exploring the common ground between the humanistic, cultural, anthropological approaches, and the scientific, cognitive, psychological approaches as she sees the bringing together of the two as among the great challenges of the field of ethnomusicology.
Email: beckerj@umich.edu
Website: http://www.music.umich.edu/departments/musicology/JudithBecker.htm

Birgit Berg received a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Brown University in May 2007. In her dissertation, titled "The music of Arabs, the sound of Islam: Hadrami ethnic and religious presence in Indonesia," she explored the cultural traditions of Arab descendants in Indonesia and analyzed the role of Arab culture in popular Indonesian Islamic arts. Her dissertation research was sponsored by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Award (DDRA), a grant from the Watson Institute for International Studies, and a Blakemore Freeman Language Study Fellowship. Birgit has also completed research on national forms of Christian music in Indonesia (the topic of her M.A. thesis at Smith College), and she has conducted field research on traditional arts in the Indonesian regions of Gorontalo, Manado/Minahasa, and Sangihe-Talaud. Currently, she is working in Washington, D.C. as the Program Coordinator for Voice of America International Broadcasting's East Asia Division.
Email: birgit.berg@gmail.com

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).
Email: acatlin@ucla.edu
Websites: http://www.apsara-media.com, shttp://www.ethnomusic.ucla.edu/people/catlin.htm

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.
Email: chopyak@saclink.csus.edu
Website: http://www.csus.edu/music/

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.
Email: michaelf@ualberta.ca
Website:http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~michaelf/

Christopher Lee is an associate professor of Religious Studies at Canisius College, in Buffalo, NY. An anthropologist by training, his research focuses on Muslim working-class poets of Urdu and their poetry in Varanasi, India.

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.
Email:akrasm@wm.edu
Website: www.wm.edu/music/faculty.php?personid=7404

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 as well as in the 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 The Bollywood Reader, New York University Press, 2008.

Email: nsarrazi@brockport.edu
Website: http://www.brockport.edu/theatre/Faculty.html

Ted Swedenburg is professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of Memories of Revolt: The 1936-39 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (U. Minnesota Press, 1995; U. Arkansas Press, 2003) and co-editor of Displacement, Diaspora and Geographies of Identity (Duke University Press, 1996) and Palestine, Israel and the Pollitics of Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2005). He is currently working on a book manuscript, Radio Interzone, which deals with "border" musics linking the Middle East to the West and to the African and South Asian diaspora. The manuscript includes chapters on Franco-Algerian rai music, on "Islamic" popular music in the U.S., France and Britain, on the music of Arab Jews, and on the popular music of Nubians in Egypt.
Email: tsweden@uark.edu
Website: http://www.uark.edu/depts/anthinfo/swedenburg.htm
Blog: http://swedenburg.blogspot.com/

Richard Wolf, Professor of Music at Harvard University, is an ethnomusicologist who has devoted his career to the interdisciplinary study of South Asian musical traditions. Wolf has written broadly about classical, folk and tribal musical traditions in South India as well as on musical traditions associated with Shiism and Sufism in North India and Pakistan. Wolf's recent publications include "Doubleness, matam and Muharram drumming in South Asia" (2007), "The Poetics of Sufi Practice: Drumming, Dancing, and Complex Agency at Madho Lal Husain (And Beyond)" (2006), and the book The Black Cow's Footprint: Time, Space, and Music in the Lives of the Kotas of South India(2005 and 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 an effort to promote a study of South Asian music that transcends conventional boundaries of geography and discipline, Wolf is editing a book titled Theorizing the Local: Music, Practice and Experience in South Asia and Beyond (under contract with Oxford University Press, New York), which stems from an International Council for Traditional Music colloquium and Radcliffe Advanced Seminar. He is also completing his own monograph titled Reciting Remembrance: Resonances of Popular Islam in South Asia (under contract with the University of Illinois Press).
Email: rwolf@fas.harvard.edu
Website: http://www.music.fas.harvard.edu/faculty/facbios.html#wolf