#  Richard Wolf 

G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of South Asian Studies

 

 

 



   ![Richard Wolf](/sites/g/files/omnuum9396/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/2026-06/Richard%20Wolf.jpg?itok=tvhgBQAr) 

 



 





 

Richard K. Wolf, G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University, began teaching in the Music Department at Harvard in 1999. He has been conducting ethnomusicological research in South Asia since 1982 and in Central Asia since 2012. Author of two monographs and editor of three collections, Wolf has published on such topics as social-cultural “style” in South Indian classical music, conceptions of space, time and music among the Kota tribal people in the Nilgiri Hills of south India, and drumming, “recitation,” and music in public Islamic contexts in India and Pakistan. Wolf’s current projects include a monograph on poet-singers entitled *The Nightingale’s Despair: Music and Moral Being in Greater Central Asia* and a volume co-edited with Virginia Danielson entitled *Musical Thinking: Poetry, Improvisation and Theory* (Oxford University Press)*.* As an ethnographic filmmaker, Wolf created [*Two Poets and a River*](https://store.der.org/two-poets-and-a-river-p1077.aspx) (Documentary Educational Resources)*,* a film focusing on themes of separation in the musico-poetic lives of two Wakhi poets living on opposite sides of the river dividing Tajikistan and Afghanistan. He is currently working on a series of films, entitled *Pots of Millet, Faces of Gold,* that provide perspectives on the Kota people through film and video footage over the past century. The first film in the series, *Transformation*(2025), has screened in India and China and will be distributed by Documentary Educational Resources.

Among Wolf’s recent accomplishments is the 2023 article prize from the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance for, “The musical poetry of endangered languages: Kota and Wakhi Poem-Songs in South and Central Asia” (*Oral Tradition* 35). From 2012-2018 Wolf held a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. During the 2018-2019 academic year he was the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. His most recent book-length publication is *Thought and Play in Musical Rhythm* (OUP 2019), a volume he coedited with Stephen Blum and Christopher Hasty. Wolf is also a writer of creative non-fiction and a performer on the South Indian *vina*.

At Harvard, Wolf is a member of the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology, the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies, the Committee on Special Concentrations, the Critical Media Practice Program, and a faculty associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.



 

 

 





 

 

- ## Academics
    
     [South Asian Studies](/academics/south-asian-studies)
- ## Person
    
     [Faculty](/person/faculty) [Faculty Steering Committee](/person/faculty-steering-committee)