Richard K. Wolf

Richard K. Wolf, professor of music and South Asian studies at Harvard, was former general editor of Ethnomusicology Translations from 2016 to 2024. He has been conducting ethnomusicological research in South Asia since 1982 and in Central Asia since 2012, publishing on such topics as social-cultural “style” in South Indian classical music, conceptions of space, time, and music among the Kota tribal people in the Nilgiri Hills of south India, and drumming, “recitation,” and music in public Islamic contexts in India and Pakistan. From 2012 to 2018 Wolf held a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. During the 2018/19 academic year he was the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. His most recent publication is Thought and Play in Musical Rhythm (OUP 2019), a volume he coedited with Stephen Blum and Christopher Hasty. Wolf is also a performer on the South Indian vina.