Written by Eliza Simikian
The Natalie L. Haslam College of Music is proud to announce that Mehrenegar Rostami, teaching assistant professor of musicology, has been elected to the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) Council Advisory Board. Professor Rostami, an expert in the music of Central Asia and the Middle East, began her three-year term in October 2025.
SEM is a premier professional organization dedicated to the study of music in its cultural, social, and material contexts. While the organization’s executive board handles day-to-day operations, the SEM Council Advisory Board acts as its strategic vision wing. As a member of the Council, Professor Rostami joins a distinguished group of international scholars tasked with identifying long-term goals for the discipline.
For Rostami, this appointment is an extension of the work already happening within the musicology program at UT.
“Our musicology faculty work closely with our undergraduate and graduate students to prepare them for a wide range of projects that connect our students with the local and global community of scholars and musicians,” Rostami said. “In this past year, our graduate students attended leading musicology/ethnomusicology conferences and presented their research to an international community of scholars.”
This connection to the global music scene often happens right in Knoxville. Rostami noted that students in her Global Currents in Music Festival class recently attended the Big Ears Music Festival, an opportunity made possible through a collaboration between festival founder Ashley Capps and an anonymous donor. By engaging with international musicians and writing about their experiences, students learned to contribute to the pressing conversations that inform contemporary music festivals.
In addition to her governance role, Professor Rostami was recently appointed by the SEM President to serve on the 21st Century Fellowship Committee. This committee awards fellowships to doctoral candidates to complete essential fieldwork, which is the community-based research that forms the backbone of ethnomusicological scholarship.
“These grants offer a lifeline to the future generations of ethnomusicologists,” Rostami said. “Ethnomusicology, like anthropology, is a fieldwork-based discipline. Without necessary funding, our researchers can neither complete their research nor grow. These grants play a key role in cultivating the growth of our researchers and the development of the field as a whole.”
Professor Rostami’s work within the SEM reflects a career defined by the intersection of high-level performance and rigorous scholarship. Whether she is performing on the santur or presenting research on the complex dynamics of human mobility and cultural identity, her work continues to create meaningful opportunities for UT students to engage with global musical traditions and contemporary scholarship in ethnomusicology.