Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology

About Daniel Reed

Daniel B. Reed has distinguished himself as a researcher, teacher, administrator, multimedia pioneer, and consummate networker during his decades at Indiana University. His colleagues and students know him to be “generous,” “kind,” “gifted,” and “indefatigable.”

He has performed in the Monkey Puzzle and Blue Sky Back musical ensembles as a composer, singer, bassist, and guitarist. A measure of his talent emerged in the selection of his composition “I Will Fall Down,” for the opening of the World Parkinson’s Congress in Kyoto, Japan in 2019. This song expressed Professor Reed’s inspirational personal engagement with Parkinson’s over the years.

Daniel Reed completed the B.A. at Ohio University (1985) as well as the M.A and Ph.D. degrees in Folklore and Ethnomusicology with a minor in African Studies (1995, 1999). His dissertation was based upon ethnographic fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire on music and masking traditions among the Dan people supported by funding from a Fulbright Fellowship. Following the completion of the Ph.D. he was appointed as Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Several years later, Daniel Reed was recruited to serve as director of the Archives of Traditional Music (ATM) at Indiana University. He returned to the Bloomington campus in 2001 and continued in his ATM administrative role until 2007. Dr. Reed was simultaneously appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. He was subsequently promoted to the rank of Associate Professor (2008), the Laura Boulton Professor (2017--present), and Professor (2018).

While serving as director of the Archives of Traditional Music, Daniel Reed, in conjunction with Virginia Danielson at Harvard University, as well as several other units from Indiana University, spearheaded several innovative digital research and preservation efforts, including two major Preservation and Access Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) entitled Sound Directions: Digital Preservation and Access for Global Audio Heritage (2004, 2007). These NEH grants laid the foundation for the later campus wide Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative that demonstrated Indiana University’s leadership and innovation in the preservation of time-based media.

Daniel Reed’s first book, Dan Ge Performance: Masks and Music in Contemporary Côte d’Ivoire (2003) received high acclaim when it was awarded the Amaury Talbot Prize by the Royal Anthropological Institute in the United Kingdom and designated as the best book in African anthropology for that year. His second book, Abidjan USA: Music Dance and Mobility in the Lives of Four Ivorian Immigrants (2016) explored the complex expressive culture of musicians who live and perform in the United States even as they move back and forth to their homeland in West Africa. This second book received elaborate praise for its broad reach from the analytic to the experiential dimensions of expressive culture. Beyond his books, Professor Reed has illuminated other dimensions of his research in numerous articles and invited book chapters that have extended to the African arts as well as to historical and medical topics in the field of ethnomusicology.

Professor Reed’s early foray into the area of multimedia in ethnomusicology demonstrated his talent for innovative approaches to the analysis and presentation of the complex performance of music, dance, and ritual. Most notably he served as primary author and researcher with Gloria Gibson for an historic exploration of sound recording and photography entitled Music and Culture of West Africa: The Straus Expedition (2002). He later contributed a research analysis of his Ivorian field recordings to the Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive (EVIADA 2009).

Professor Reed has taught a wide range of courses over the years, beginning with the large Introduction to World Music and Culture and continuing to courses including West African Music, African Popular Music, and Global Popular Music, and Music in Religious Thought and Experience. He has taught core courses in ethnomusicology such as Paradigms in Ethnomusicology, Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, the Study of Ethnomusicology, and History of Ideas: Mobility in Ethnomusicology. He has also tirelessly served on student exam committees and advised students on grant applications for a broad range of successful awards. Over the years he has chaired or co-chaired 21 Ph.D. dissertations and 2 M.A. theses. Finally, he has generously supervised independent research as well as undergraduate honor’s theses, and capstone projects.

Complementing his exemplary research, teaching, and scholarship, Daniel B. Reed has served his profession, university, department, and the Bloomington community with a monumental range and depth of service. At Indiana University Professor Reed has participated on countless review committees for fellowships, as well as tenure and promotion dossiers. In the community, art patrons will long remember the effort that he extended to arrange for the Kotchenga Dance Company of Ivorian musicians and masked dancers on stilts to open the Indiana University Eskanazi Museum’s exhibit, Visions from the Forest: The Art of Liberia and Sierra Leone, with a procession from the outer courtyard through the front entrance of the museum (2015). Others will know of his work to raise funds for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, his campaign to save the Bradford Woods outdoor education program, and his performance to raise money for the earthquake victims of Haiti.

Daniel Reed’s passion for serving Indiana University and the world beyond will be long remembered. His humor and courage have given us all an exemplary model for our own lives as university citizens and as community members.

-Ruth M. Stone

• Africa
• music and religion
• mask performance
• ritual
• identity
• popular music
• immigration
• transnationalism
• diaspora
• music and health

• African Mobilities and Expressive Culture
• Global Pop Music
• Music, Immigration and Diaspora
• Music in Religious Thought & Experience
• Music in African Life
• Writing & Representation

• Laura Boulton Professor of Ethnomusicology (2016)
• IU Vice Provost for Research Summer Faculty Fellowship (2014)
• IU Trustees Teaching Award (2014, 2006)
• National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar Award (2011)
• Amaury Talbot Prize for book Dan Ge Performance (2004)