Faculty Fellows

Aditi Deo is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Languages division of the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University. She has a PhD from Indiana University Bloomington (USA) in Ethnomusicology, with minors in Folklore and Communication & Culture. Her research interest is primarily in music of the Indian subcontinent, especially Hindustani Khyal music, Hindi film music, and vernacular folk traditions in Rajasthan and Gujarat. Her work addresses conceptual questions related to, among other areas, performance practice, technologies, pedagogies, circulation, and heritage.

Aditi has worked in the Archives of Traditional Music and the AAAMC, both sound archives at Indiana University, helping with preservation and curation. She has held positions as Faculty Fellow at IISER Pune (2014-17) and Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford University (2011-13). She has published in the Journal of South Asian Popular Culture and has several forthcoming articles and chapters. Aditi has recently begun a book project, revising her PhD dissertation into a monograph.

Aditi's research interest is primarily in music of the Indian subcontinent including Hindustani Khyal music, Hindi film music, and vernacular folk traditions in Rajasthan and Gujarat. Her work addresses conceptual questions related to, among other areas, performance practice, technologies, pedagogies, circulation, and heritage.

• 2019 ‘India: Modern and Contemporary Performance Practice’ in Sage Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, Janet Sturman, ed. Sage Publications
• 2017 ‘Radios, Memory Cards and Ringtones, or How the Mobile Phone became our Favourite Music Playback Device’ (co-authored with Vebhuti Duggal) in Journal of South Asian Popular Culture
• 2013 ‘Digital Community Archives for Vernacular Musics: Cases from India’ in Journal of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives vol. 41.

FORTHCOMING: 
 

• ‘Practice, Performance and the Archives: Cases from Indian Classical Music,’ (co-authored with Lakshmi Subramanian) introduction to journal special issue of the Indian Theater Journal 
• ‘Technological Conversations with the Past: Musicians, Connoisseurs and the Audio Archive for Khayal’ in Indian Theater Journal
• ‘Vernacular Publics and its Publics: Exploring the Political Dimensions of Sounds, Technologies in Bikaner’ in Music, Modernity and the Public Sphere in India, Tejaswini Niranjana, ed. Oxford University Press

Undergraduate Courses (at Ahmedabad University and at other instituions)

• Music and its Contexts
• Qualitative Research Methods
• Critical Reading and Communication: Science and Society

SELECTED CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS: 

• 2019 ‘Technological Conversations with the Past: Musicians, Connoisseurs and the Audio Archive for Khayal’ at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual conference, Bloomington, IN, USA
• 2018 ‘Gharana and the Archives for Hindustani Khayal Music’ at the Association for Asian Studies in Asia annual conference, Ashoka University, New Delhi
• 2016 ‘Radios, Memory Cards and Ringtones, or How the Mobile Phone Became Our Favourite Music Playback Device’ (co-authored with Vebhuti Duggal) at Imagining the Indian Popular: Globalization and its Discontents national conference at Zakir Husain Delhi College, New Delhi
• 2016 ‘Oral Vernacular Music and its Publics: The Political Dimensions of Sounds and Technologies’ at Music, Modernity and the Public Sphere international conference, University of Chicago Center in New Delhi
• 2015 ‘Technologically Crafting Heritage: The Cultural Politics of Vernacular Music Documentation in Northern India’ at The Music Box and its Reverberations: Technology and Music in India international conference at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

SELECTED INVITED TALKS: 
 

• 2019 ‘Air Travel in Ancient India: Reflecting on Cultural Heritage in a Post-truth Era of Digital Circulation’ at the Digital Humanities Conference, IIT Hyderabad (recorded talk)
• 2019 ‘Observations about Gender in Khayal Gharanas’ at the Manipal Center for Humanities, Manipal, Karnataka
• 2018 ‘Ethnomusicology and Music Mapping’ at the Memory of the Andhra People workshop, Amaravathi, Andhra Pradesh
• 2017 ‘Notes on Music Archiving: Curation, Access, Pedagogy’ at the Writing and Archiving Music: Challenges and Conversations seminar at Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Resource Centre (JBMRC), CSSSC, Kolkata

CONFERENCE AND WORKSHOP ORGANISATION:   
 

• 2015 ‘Texts, Tunes, Technologies: Perspectives on Indian Musics,’ symposium and workshop, 20-21 March 2015, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, India
• 2015 ‘The Music Box and its Reverberations: Technology and Music in India,’ international conference, 14-17 Jan 2015, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India