Philip V. Bohlman is the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities and Music at the University of Chicago, where he is also an adjunct faculty member of the Divinity School, and Honorarprofessor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover. A pianist, he is the Artistic Director of the University of Chicago ensemble-in-residence, the New Budapest Orpheum Society. Phil was raised in rural Wisconsin, where his earliest studies were as a church musician, before he took his university studies in piano and ethnomusicology at the universities of Wisconsin and Illinois. His research and teaching include a wide range of subjects formed at the intersection of music and religion, from Jewish music to the music of American religious communities to ethnographic studies of pilgrimage and myth in South Asia. He has held numerous guest professorships, among them those at Berkeley, Bologna, Cornell, Freiburg im Breisgau, Humboldt University of Berlin, Newcastle upon Tyne, Vienna, and most recently at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Among his many publications are The Study of Folk Music in the Modern World (1988), The World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine 1936-1940 (1992), World Music: A Very Short Introduction (2002), Jüdische Volksmusik: Eine mitteleuropäische Geistesgeschichte (2005), and Music in American Religious Experience (2006; coedited with ISM alumna, Maria Chow, and Edith Blumhofer). Jewish Music and Modernity appears this fall in “AMS Studies in Music,” and Redemption and Revival: Sacred Music in the Making of European Modernity will appear in 2009. He and the New Budapest Orpheum Society record for Cedille Records. A winner of the Edward Dent Medal of the Royal Music Association and the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, Philip Bohlman is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, which awarded him the Derek Allen Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Musicology in 2007. He is Past-President of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
