Music Studies Archives

Christian James

Mr. Christian James is a PhD Candidate in Indiana University’s Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. His dissertation examines the role of musical performance in internationally funded human development initiatives operating within the Kangra District of Himachal Pradesh.

For over a decade, Mr. James has studied cultures and languages of North India with a special interest in folksongs of western Himachal Pradesh and Greater Punjab. He is proficient in four South Asian languages: Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and the Kangri dialect of Western Pahari. He has received multiple awards and fellowships for language and area studies, including two Critical Language Scholarships. With support from the U.S. Department of Education and Indiana University’s Center for the Study of Global Change, Mr. James spent the 2021-2022 academic year enrolled as the sole student in the first ever Kangri language course offered through the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Alongside his dissertation topic, Mr. James’ research interests include language ideology, public folklore, and Indic musicology. In 2021, the Midwestern Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology awarded him the JaFran Jones prize in recognition of his paper, “Nādānusandhān: Sound Studies and its Lexical Genealogy in Hindi-language Music Scholarship.” Mr. James has worked as an Articles Editor for Folklore Forum, the open-access journal of Folklore and Ethnomusicology Publications (also known as Trickster Press). In 2020, he served Traditional Arts Indiana as a contributor and editor for Memory, Art, & Aging, a public-facing resource guide encouraging older adults and elder care workers to engage with folk and traditional arts.

Mr. James has maintained an abiding passion for music throughout his life. In 2014, he completed a Bachelor’s of Music degree in composition from Oberlin Conservatory. His compositions have featured in several international venues, including the Charlotte New Music Festival in North Carolina (2013), Dharamshala International Film Festival in Himachal Pradesh (2014), and the Syndicate for the New Arts in Ohio (2017). He has worked as a choral singer, music educator, and church music director in Ohio and Indiana as well as his home state of Michigan.

Mr. James’ Fulbright-Nehru project investigates the role of participatory song in the feminist social development work of Jagori Rural Charitable Trust, a non-governmental organization operating in the Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh. Through a combination of participant observation, recorded interview, and audiovisual documentation, Mr. James assesses the effects of collective singing on the delivery of the organization’s objectives concerning the social, economic, and political empowerment of women and girls. The final report documents and analyzes the organization’s total song repertoire, the effects of specific songs, and participants’ experiences of those effects through performance.

Vincent Kelley

Vincent Kelley is a PhD candidate in music studies at the University of Pennsylvania with interests in South Asian music, global jazz, social theory, music and religion, and the history of ethnomusicology. He received a BA in religious studies from Grinnell College in 2016 and an MMus in musicology and ethnomusicology from King’s College London in 2019. Vincent wrote his master’s thesis on the historical, aesthetic, and social relationships among the tabla, naqqara, and kathak performers in North India, which he is currently revising for publication. He has performed on drum set and tabla in jazz, Hindustani, and popular music settings in the United States and India. Vincent is also interested in Hindi, Urdu, and Persian languages and literature, and has received the American Institute of Indian Studies fellowship to study Urdu and the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship to study Persian. Vincent’s PhD research focuses on the political economy and aesthetics of jazz, Hindustani music, and Indo-jazz fusion in the late-twentieth century.

Vincent’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating jazz in post-Independence India through the lens of the Jazz Yatra music festivals held in Mumbai and Delhi from 1978 to 2003. The Jazz Yatra promoted the interaction between Indian classical music and jazz, and became the longest-running jazz festival in the world outside of the United States and Europe. For the project, Vincent is employing oral historical, ethnographic, and archival research methodologies to understand how pivotal economic, political, and cultural transitions in late-twentieth century India and the United States were influenced by and through the Jazz Yatra festival.

Anushka Kulkarni

Anushka Kulkarni is a PhD candidate in musicology at UC Davis. She holds a bachelor’s degree in music in vocal performance and music history from the University of Delaware. Her primary research interests are in 18th-century opera, Rabindra Sangeet, and postcolonial studies. Her dissertation, “The Empire Sings Back: Operatic Histories of British-Indian Colonial Encounter”, engages in a transnational study of both European opera and Bengali musical drama, and their intersections with the empire. Anushka’s research has been supported by the UC Davis Dean’s Graduate Summer Fellowship. In 2023, she was the recipient of a Critical Language Scholarship.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Anushka is conducting archival work at the National Library, the West Bengal State Archives, and Asiatic Society, all situated in Kolkata, as well as at the Rabindra Bhavan Library and Archives in Santiniketan. This archival research will contribute to her dissertation on opera and British-Indian colonial encounter in 19th- and 20th-century Calcutta. Her work is also examining the complex and often contradictory representations of coloniality in musical drama. Besides, she is accessing primary source material on the presence and reception of Italian opera in 19th-century Calcutta as well as on the musical drama, or gitinatya, of the Bengali polymath, Rabindranath Tagore.