Professor of Music History/Musicology/Ethnomusicology at the University of Arkansas/Little Rock, USA.
His research has been chiefly on the temple drumming of Kerala (India), where he has conducted fieldwork at various times since 1988. He has published in the International Journal of Hindu Studies, Ethnomusicology, Yearbook for Traditional Music, Asian Music, the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, the SAGE Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, World of Music, Museum Anthropology, and the books Music and Dance as Everyday South Asia (S. Morelli and Z. Sherinian, eds., Oxford, forthcoming) and Theorizing the Local (R. Wolf, ed., Oxford, 2009). He has also presented papers at Harvard U., the U. of Chicago, meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), College Music Society (CMS)(national and international), the South Asia Conference (Madison, Wisconsin), the European Association of Social Anthropologists (Estonia), and at various local festivals and conferences. He has served as president of two different regional chapters of SEM and coordinated the 2011 CMS/South Central meeting at UA Little Rock. His 1995 Ph.D. is from New York U. (Ethnomusicology), where he studied with Kay Shelemay, Harold Powers, and Phillip Zarrilli, and he also has BA and BM (Piano, Music History) degrees from Oberlin College (1979). He has performed chenda (Kerala drum) frequently since 1989, throughout Kerala (including at Guruvayoor and the Kerala Kalamandalam), and in many states in the US.