Kevin Fellezs

Associate Professor of Music, Ethnomusicology
Director of Center for Ethnomusicology (Spring 2024)
Office Address: 
806 Dodge Hall
(212) 854-3825

Kevin Fellezs joined our faculty as Assistant Professor of Music in 2012.  He was previously on the faculty of the University of California at Merced.  He holds the PhD in History of Consciousness (American Studies) from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

His recent book titled Listen But Don’t Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Across the TransPacific (Duke University Press, 2019) shows the ways in which slack key guitar is a site for the articulation of Hawaiian values. Native Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian slack key guitarists are, in fact, collectively reconfiguring notions of Hawaiian belonging, aesthetics, and politics throughout the transPacific.

His book titled Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion (Duke University Press, 2011) is a study of fusion (jazz-rock-funk) music of the 1970s, which won the 2012 Woody Guthrie Book Award.

He has published articles in Jazz Perspectives, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. He has also published essays in a number of edited anthologies including Alien Encounters: Asian Americans and Popular Culture (Duke University), Heavy Metal: Controversies and Countercultures (Equinox), Yellow Power, Yellow Soul: The Radical Art of Fred Ho (University of Illinois), the Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter (Cambridge University), and Racism Postrace (Duke University).

Degrees from Other Institutions: 
BA
Music/Jazz Studies
San Francisco State University
1998
MA
Humanities
San Francisco State University
2000
PhD
History of Consciousness, American Studies
UC Santa Cruz
2004