Richard K. Wolf

Professor of Music, Professor of of South Asian Studies
Ethnomusicology
rwolf@fas.harvard.edu
richardkwolf.com
Office: 031 Memorial Hall
Mailing address: Music Building / Harvard University / Cambridge, MA 02138

Richard K. Wolf, Professor of Music and South Asian Studies, began teaching in the Music Department at Harvard in 1999. He has been conducting ethnomusicological research in South Asia since 1982 and in Central Asia since 2012. Author of two monographs and editor of three collections, Wolf has published 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.

Wolf is currently preparing a monograph and an ethnographic film concerning music, language, and moral being among the Wakhi people of adjacent parts of Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and western China. From 2012-2018 Wolf held a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. During the 2018-2019 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.

Richard Wolf’s website