New Members Join Council on the Arts
This semester, the Council on the Arts at Harvard, a committee of the
Faculty of Arts and Sciences that awards the Office for the Arts grants,
welcomed three new members to its ranks this semester: Jorie Graham, Boylston
Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric, H. Peik Larsen, Head Tutor of the Visual
and Environmental Studies Department, and Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G. Gordon
Watts Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology), and former chair of the Music
Department.
Graham earned her B.A. at New York University and M.F.A. at the University
of Iowa. Her interests are English poetry, American poetry, contemporary
poetics, film theory, and painting. A selection of her titles include:
All Poetry: Speaking Subject (2002), Swarm (2000), The Dream of the Unified
Field (1996), Materialism (1993), Region of Unlikeness (1991), The End
of Beauty (1987), Erosion (1983), and Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts
(1980).
Larsen studied at Middlebury College, San Francisco Arts Institute, and
Tufts University at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His
works have been exhibited at the Fitchburg Art Museum; the DNA Gallery,
Provincetown, Massachusetts; the Fuller Museum of Arts, Brockton, Massachusetts;
Swan Castle, Kleve, Germany; The Chapel Gallery, Newton Massachusetts;
and the Martin Summers Gallery, San Francisco, California, among others.
He exhibits his work at Lawrence/Feuer/LaMontagne Gallery in New York.
After attending a Council on the Arts meeting for the first time Larsen
noted, "From the Council and grants process, I learnt about the extraordinary
number and range of creative undergraduate activities and publications
at Harvard. The arts at Harvard are a huge part of student life."
Shelemay received her Ph.D. in Musicology at the University of Michigan.
Her fields of specialization are African music (especially Ethiopia),
music of the Middle East, and musical diversity in urban North America.
She joined the Harvard faculty in 1992 after teaching at Columbia, NYU,
and Wesleyan, and has offered courses on ethnomusicology, the musical
traditions of Africa and the Middle East, and music and memory, among
others. Author of numerous books and articles, her textbook Soundscapes,
Exploring Music in a Changing World, was published in 2001 by W.W. Norton.
Two of her prior books include A Song of Longing, An Ethiopian Journey
(University of Illinois Press, 1991) and Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and
Remembrance Among Syrian Jews. (University of Chicago Press, 1998). Shelemay
is a past-President of the Society for Ethnomusicology and a Congressional
appointee to and Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife
Center at the Library of Congress. A fellow of the American Academy of
Arts and Science, Shelemay is currently editing a volume on pain and its
transformations through expressive culture as well as working on an ethnography
of the arts as sites of dispute.
The Council on the Arts awards grants for fall and spring semester projects
as well as ARTS FIRST projects. The Council on the Arts also awards yearly
Office for the Arts Prizes during the spring semester.
