Veit Erlmann

Veit Erlmann is a cultural historian / anthropologist / ethnomusicologist and the Endowed Chair of Music History at the University of Texas at Austin. His main areas of interest are music and popular culture in South Africa and Indonesia; sound studies; and the anthropology of intellectual property law. His most recent publication is Reason and Resonance. A History of Modern Aurality (Zone Books, 2010). Currently he is working on a book on intellectual property in the South African creative industries that will be published by Duke University Press.

Veit Erlmann holds the Endowed Chair of Music History. He studied musicology, sociology, anthropology and philosophy in Berlin and Cologne, where he obtained a Dr.phil. in 1978 and did a Habilitation in musicology in 1989 and in anthropology in 1994. He has done fieldwork in Ecuador and in several African countries such as Cameroon, Niger, Ghana, South Africa and Lesotho. Currently he is doing research in West Sumatra, Indonesia. Dr. Erlmann has been on the faculties of the University of Natal, the University of Chicago, the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and the Free University of Berlin. Among his publications are African Stars, Studies in Black South African Performance and Nightsong, and Performance, Power and Practice in South Africa, both published by the University of Chicago Press. His most recent book,Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination, published by Oxford University Press won the Alan P.Merriam Prize for the best English-language monograph in ethnomusicology.