Steven Friedson Ph.D.

Steven Friedson is University Distinguished Research Professor of Music and Anthropology and head of the ethnomusicology program.

A graduate of the University of Washington, Professor Freidson conducted research in Malawi under the auspices of a Fulbright grant. For the past fifteen years he has been working in the Volta Region of Ghana, where he has established a research center on the Guinea Coast. He is author of Dancing Prophets Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing(University of Chicago Press 1996), and Remains of Ritual: Northern Gods in a Southern Land (University of Chicago Press 2009), winner of the Alan P. Merriam Prize for Outstanding Book in Ethnomusicology. He is currently working on the final book of a trilogy on music and ritual. In a previous life he was a member of the 60s rock band the Kingsmen.