Musical Relationalities in Islamic Lands and Diasporas

Orit Bashkin is the Mabel Greene Myers Professor in The Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University (2004), and her BA (1995) and MA (1999) from Tel Aviv University.  Her publications deal with Iraqi history, the history of Middle Eastern and Iraqi Jews, modern Arab cultural revival movements, and the connections between history, memory and literature. Her current research project is a cultural history of Jewish life in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. She is the author of the books: Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel (2017); New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (2012); and The Other Iraq – Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (2009), all with Stanford University Press. She is the coeditor of the volumes: Jews and Journeys: Travel and the Performance of Jewish Identity, with Joshua Levinson (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021); Civilizing Emotions: Concepts in Nineteenth Century Asia and Europe, with Margrit Pernau, Helge Jordheim, and others (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Nili Belkind is a research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University (2014) and is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the Middle East—with a special focus on Palestine/Israel— and the Caribbean. Together with Prof. Seroussi she is currently researching interfaith/ interethnic musical relationalities in Muslim lands and in diasporas that originated in these lands.

Nili’s award-winning book (International Council of Traditions of Music and Dance [ICTMD] 2022) Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production (Routledge 2021) studies the complex relationship of musical culture to political life in Palestine-Israel. Viewing expressive culture as a potent site for understanding these dynamics, the book examines the politics of sound to show how music-making reflects and forms identities, and in the process, shapes communities. Author has “followed the conflict” by “following the music,” from concert halls to demonstrations, mixed-city community centers to Palestinian refugee camp children’s clubs, alternative urban scenes and even a checkpoint. In all the contexts presented, the monograph is thematically and theoretically underpinned by the ways in which music is used to culturally assert or reterritorialize spatial and social boundaries in a situation of ongoing political violence.

Nili’s publications also probe the different ways in which music-making intervenes on conceptualizations of place and space or anchors (emergent) modes of belonging. She has published articles or book chapters on topics such as music and: urban regeneration (2019); the construction of diasporic imaginations (2016; 2024); cultural intimacy across ethnonational conflict (2021); social movements (2013); cultural policy and diplomacy (2010 and 2021); Orientalism (2024).

Prior to her academic career Nili spent many years in the US-based music industry. She worked as a world, Latin and reggae music product manager for Virgin megastores; label manager for RykoLatino and other companies; album producer and compiler; live showcase producer; booker; radio DJ; music writer (National Geographic Music Online; liner notes) and other roles. Two albums she co-produced (by Plena Libre) were nominated for a Grammy. In her research projects she always seeks to contribute to the artists and communities that have brought her into their fold. 

Nancy E. Berg, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, is the author of Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq (SUNY Press, 1996) and More and More Equal: The Literary Works of Sami Michael (Lexington Press, 2005). With Naomi B. Sokoloff she edited both What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew(University of Washington Press, 2018) and Since 1948: Israeli Literature in the Making (SUNY Press, 2020). Her anthology Exile and the Jews: Literature History and Identity coedited with Marc Saperstein was published just last year by The Jewish Publication Society & University of Nebraska Press. Longing and Belonging: Jews of the Modern Islamic World (UPenn Press, 2025) with Dina Danon, a collection of essays, is her most recent book. Berg’s research interests include Israeli women’s writing, Jewish Iraqi literature, and the apology.

Issa Boulos is an internationally award-winning composer, lyricist, researcher, and songwriter. His works have been performed by various groups and orchestras around the world. He studied piano, ‘ud, and voice at an early age. He later pursued music composition with Gustavo Leone, Athanasios Zervas, and William Russo at Columbia College Chicago and with Robert Lombardo and Ilya Levinson at Roosevelt University. He obtained his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Leiden University.

Issa injects new life into his music throughout his career by incorporating traditional instruments in innovative ways. His compositions are commissioned and performed by nationally acclaimed orchestras and ensembles. He has composed music for full orchestra, chamber, mixed ensembles, and written hundreds of songs, including several hits. Among his commissions are four pieces for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, composition/performance for the Silk Road Ensemble, and original scores for award-winning documentaries, plays, feature films, and musicals. Through these efforts, Issa has gained recognition in the United States, the Middle East, and Europe. He has served as a lecturer at the University of Chicago for nearly a decade and co-founded the Qatar Music Academy and acted as its Head of Music since its inception in 2010. Boulos serves as Manager of the Harper College Community Music and Arts Center and adjunct faculty of music. 

Dina Danon is associate professor of Judaic Studies and History at Binghamton University. She holds bachelor’s degrees in History and French from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate in History from Stanford University. Her research focuses on the eastern Sephardi diaspora during modern times and draws heavily on previously unexplored Ladino language archival material. Danon is particularly interested in social history and how its tools help revise prevailing scholarship not only on the Sephardi world but on Jewish modernity as a whole.  Capturing the voices of both destitute beggars and lay oligarchs, peddlers and guildsmen, housewives and rabbis, her first book, The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History (Stanford University Press, 2020) was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Culture.  She began work on her second book, which explores the marketplace of matchmaking, marriage, and divorce in the modern Ottoman Sephardi world, as a fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is co-editor of Longing and Belonging: Jews in the Modern Islamic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). 

Oded Erez is an assistant professor in the Department of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and visiting scholar (2024-2025) at the Taub Center for Israel Studies at NYU. His research focuses on popular music in Israel/Palestine and the East Mediterranean, with an emphasis on the intersection of aesthetics and politics. His published work appeared in Journals such as Popular Music, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Levantine Studies. He also contributed chapters to the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Israel and the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies. He is currently completing a book on popular music and the making of Israeli ethnicities. Website.

Jonathan Glasser is Associate Professor of Anthropology at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He is the author of The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2016), which won the L. Carl Brown Book Prize from the American Institute for Maghrib Studies and a Mahmoud Guettat International Prize in Musicology from the Tunisian Ministry of Cultural Affairs. His journal articles have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, American Ethnologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Hespéris-Tamuda, and Turath. Glasser recently completed a book manuscript titled More Than Friends: Muslim-Jewish Intimacy in Algerian Music. 

Edwin Seroussi (Ph.D in Music, UCLA, 1988) is the Emanuel Alexandre Professor Emeritus of Musicology and former director of the Jewish Music Research Centre at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and visiting scholar at Dartmouth College. He comes to Yale after holding a fellowship at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2023-4). His research focuses on musical cultures of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, interactions between Jewish and Islamic cultures, Jewish liturgical music, Judeo-Spanish song, and popular music in Israel. Within these subjects he explores the process of hybridization, diaspora, nationalism, and transnationalism. His last book, Sonic Ruins of Modernity: Judeo-Spanish Folksongs Today (Routledge, 2023), stresses the agency of strategically-located individuals and their social networks, the role of recording technologies, and processes of reception and consumption in the shaping of contemporary popular music marketed as “folk.” At the ISM he will be working on a monograph on Sephardic religious music that summarizes his continuing engagement with this subject.

Jonathan H. Shannon is Professor of Anthropology, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, The City University of New York. He earned his B.A. from Stanford University and the Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center. His research and writing focus on culture in the Arab world and Mediterranean, with a special focus on Syria, Morocco, Spain, and Turkey, and among Syrian migrants across Europe. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, he is the author of Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria (2006),  A Wintry Day in Damascus: Syrian Stories (2012), and Performing al-Andalus: Music and Nostalgia across the Mediterranean (2015), as well as co-editor of the volume Music and Cultural Diplomacy in the Middle East: Geopolitical Re-Configurations for the 21^st Century (2024).

Suhail Yusuf (stage name: Suhail Yusuf Khan) received his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University ’24. His dissertation, “Bridge Overtones: Lessons from the Sarangi” is the first in-depth ethnomusicological study of the North Indian bowed instrument tradition by a hereditary sarangi player. He brings together expertise from a performance career that has extended over twenty-five years and academic research to explore issues of gender, castes, ethnicity, and exclusion as they pertain to the performance, circulation, and reception of music. Suhail’s project at the ISM, “The Sonic Resonance of Interfaith, Identity, and Inclusion Practices in Contemporary Music Making” aims to examine the diverse transnational dialogues between musicians of different faiths, ethnicities, and genders in the United States. It focuses on the events and relationships between Western and Indian musicians exploring musical forms including Qawwālī (South Asian Sufi Songs), Khyāl (pre-modern Indian classical songs), Ashkenazi Jewish liturgical nusach (music style or tradition), Bhajan (Hindu devotional songs), and music by Abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). Suhail comes to Yale from the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of music, dance, and theatre where he taught and designed curriculum as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music History (2021-2024).