Ethnomusicology graduate student Chris McGuinness was awarded a fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) to conduct field work for his dissertation on electronic dance music (EDM) in India.  Chris brings to his work his own experience as a Bollywood composer-producer, and as an EDM artist who has performed extensively in India.

Chris was also awarded the Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy Prize for his paper, presented at the 2017 Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Conference, “Reframed as Heroes: Communist Martyr Songs in Telengana, India.”  In awarding the honor, the Prize Committee stated, “‘Reframed as Heroes’ takes a sophisticated and theoretically informed approach to the emotions mediated by martyr songs among revolutionaries in Telengana…The tying of the politics and ethics of the revolutionary movement to this aesthetic was especially well handled, and demonstrated through a number of well chosen and persuasive audio-visual clips from the author’s ethnographic research. Throughout this short paper, the author demonstrated a balanced blend of political history, ethnography, sonic and dialogue analysis, anthropology of emotion, and a clear argument, backed up with strong detail. This was an original topic handled with great sensitivity, and we congratulate the author on the award of the Nazir Jairazbhoy prize.”

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