The Graduate Center—CUNY is pleased to announce the appointment of Kofi Agawu to the faculty of the music department. Prof. Agawu is a scholar of enormous range who has had a lasting impact on three distinct fields of music studies: music theory, musicology, and ethnomusicology.

Kofi Agawu is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including Princeton’s Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities in 2011 and the Dent Medal, awarded by the Royal Music Association in 1992. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990 in the area of “Folklore and Popular Culture.” He has been invited to serve as keynote speaker at prestigious conferences more than thirty times throughout his career.

A scholar with a genuinely international reputation and presence, Prof. Agawu has been appointed “Extraordinary Professor” at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, where he holds an honorary doctorate. He is a fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Agawu has written extensively on African music, including three books, African Rhythm:A Northern Ewe Perspective (1995), Representing African Music: Post-Colonial Notes, Queries, Positions (2003), and The African Imagination in Music (2016). Agawu’s work in music-theoretic discourse has focused on endowing analytic studies with a semiotic perspective, particularly through two books, Playing With Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (1991), and Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music (2007).

We are thrilled beyond measure to welcome Prof. Agawu to our faculty.

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