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During my childhood I moved frequently within the United States (Champaign, IL, Stamford, CT, Montclair, NJ, Denver, CO, and Portland, OR). I attended private and inner-city public schools, as well as a liberal arts college (Lewis & Clark) and a land-grant public university (Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

I am a white racialized cis-gendered male living in Cincinnati, Ohio. My life partner Meera Murthi and daughter Amaya are my inspiration to grow and flourish.
Between four and six generations ago, my ancestors left Europe—some voluntarily, some involuntarily—and settled in various parts of the world. My father was brought up in India by Presbyterian missionaries, and my mother was raised in Paraguay by German-speaking Mennonite doctors working with leprosy. As a young person, my exposure to the soundscapes, languages, foods, and customs of my relatives in India and Latin America fostered in me a deep
fascination for cultural diversity.

When I was five, my father married the daughter of the late Bruno Nettl, who fled Czechoslovakia as a boy during WWII and went on to research the musics and societies of Indigenous North America, Iran, and India, ultimately becoming a major figure in the field of ethnomusicology. My multi-sited upbringing and Bruno’s mentorship opened a space of life-long
learning for me through the
study of anthropology and
ethnomusicology.

I have been fortunate to learn from
artists and scholars in the United States, India, Zimbabwe, Paraguay, Chile and Guatemala. As a white
racialized North American cis-gender man living on stolen land with no ancestral ties, I understand that my right to do research is a privilege that others grant me conditionally, one that is rooted in the maintenance of relationships of honesty, trust, compassion and care. It is not a carte blanche condition following from an IRB protocol or a period of initiation in the field, as so many ethnographies would have us believe.
My professional goals have evolved in response to a broader consciousness of white supremacist values and intersectional inequities within the humanities and social sciences. As an educator, musician, ethnographer, and producer of digital content, I have long believed that the purpose of my work was to open hearts and minds to the multitude of human experiences and positionalities. This remains a noble goal, but it is not sufficient to address the dire and uneven challenges facing our world. My research is motivated by the challenge of marshalling the resources of the arts, ritual, and media to confront systemic inequities at the intersection of caste, race, gender, poverty, labor, and environment.
As a human and the father of a bi-racial girl, I strive for a non-violent, just and equitable future for our world. I come to this work with an intention to not replicate historical harms and to honor the relationships, humanity and labor of my collaborators and friends. If there is permission and invitation to come into community of non-white bodies and engage in a space of storytelling, I seek to learn from their stories and to be transparent about my own story, but not to tell their stories through my story, or vice versa. I seek to collaborate with BIPOC and Subaltern scholars, to engage with and cite scholarships in vernacular languages, and to work with communities to identify meaningful ways to serve and reciprocate. I seek to honor local divinities, ancestors, and elders, not simply as an ethical practice of research, but as a moral imperative of respecting the land, its rightful inhabitants, and our shared humanity.


I currently teach and mentor students in the University of Cincinnati's Ethno/Musicology, Anthropology and Asian Studies programs. As an ethnomusicologist working in a traditional music conservatory, my role has been to call out and call in the practice of self-examination and perpetuation of white systemic harm and oppression, whether that involves rethinking the curriculum or advocating more inclusive approaches to recruitment, teaching and research. While engaging students in the study of music elsewhere, the traditional subject of ethnomusicology, I am increasingly engaged in ethnography at home.

The city of Cincinnati where I live and work sits on the unceded ancestral lands of Indigenous Algonquian speaking peoples, including the Delaware, Miami, and Shawnee. Cincinnati is also marred by a long history of racial violence and continues to be highly segregated on the basis of race and class.
My course “Listening to Gentrification in Cincinnati” focuses on neighborhoods that are undergoing processes of gentrification involving the economic expulsion of Black Americans and working-class whites originally from western Appalachia. The predominantly white and privileged students in my class are asked to move outside of their comfort zones and actively engage with and learn from members of diverse neighborhoods.


Alongside neurologist Dr. Rhonna Shatz and a team of social workers and music therapists, I lead a community-based program called “Musical Awe” that pairs music and medical students with people in the community who have Alzheimers Disease, along with their care partners. This course is part of a larger research project investigating the ways that the arts can generate feelings of awe and positivity, improving functional connectivity in our brains and social connectivity in our communities.