The first episode of Season 2 of The Sounding Jewish Podcast features Dr. Anna Schultz. We discuss her ethnographic fieldwork with the Bene Israel Jewish communities of India and Israel.
Anna Schultz is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Chicago, where she is also an associate member of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and a member of the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies. The core issue animating her research in India and beyond is music’s power to activate profound religious experiences that in turn shape other identities. She explores nationalism in Western Indian Hindu temple performance, gendered translation in Indian Jewish song, diasporic longing in Indo-Caribbean American Hinduism, and rural-urban collisions in the devotional songs of an Indian classical singer. More recently, she has begun turning her attention toward issues of race and migration in American popular musics. Her first book, Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013, and her second book, Songs of Translation: Bene Israel Gender and Textual Orality, is also under contract with OUP. With Sumanth Gopinath, she was awarded the H. Colin Slim Award by the American Musicological Society for the article, "Sentimental Remembrance and the Amusements of Forgetting in Karl and Harty's "Kentucky."" Dr. Schultz’s research has been supported by fellowships from Fulbright-Hays, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of University Women, the Hellman Foundation, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the University of Illinois, and Stanford University.
