Kevin C. KarnesDivisional Dean of ArtsSenior Associate Dean of FacultyProfessor of Music

• PhDBrandeis University2001
• MMusUniversity of Washington1996
• BSMassachusetts Institute of Technology1995

Kevin C. Karnes is a musicologist who studies sounding expressions of identity, difference, and belonging in contemporary eastern and central Europe. His work bridges archival research and ethnography, engaging projects in such domains as sound studies, anthropology, philosophy, and art history. He is the author of four books, most recently Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and the editor of seven volumes, including Korngold and His World (Princeton UP, 2019) and Jewish Folk Songs from the Baltics (A-R Editions, 2014). He has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2020-22) and founding series editor of the Oxford Keynotes Series of Oxford University Press (2014-20). Since 2022 he has taught as Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Musicology at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music in Riga. His research has been supported by grants, fellowships, and awards from the ACLS, the NEH, and the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies. He is currently writing a new book on techno culture and east/west European integration at the turn of the 1990s, titled Electric Future: Berlin, Techno, the USSR, and the Dream of a New Europe.

As Divisional Dean of Arts, director of Emory Arts, and co-director of the Emory Arts & Social Justice program, Kevin works across the campus and the region to connect individuals and groups through artistic work and the conversations it sparks, focusing intently on issues of social justice, civil and human rights, and buried or forgotten histories. His work in these areas has been supported by grants from the NEA, the Arison Arts Foundation, the lululemon Centre for Social Impact, and the Simons Foundation. For more on these projects, please visit http://arts.emory.edu.

Kevin C. Karnes, “The DIY Avant-Garde on the Transit Riga–(West) Berlin, 1981-91,” in Music, Sound, and Global Modernism: A Critical History, ed. Daniel M. Grimley and Sherry D. Lee (Cambridge UP, forthcoming)

Kevin C. Karnes and John T. Lysaker, “Listening In: ‘Music Discomposed’ near 60,” in Music with Stanley Cavell in Mind, ed. David LaRocca (Bloomsbury, forthcoming)

Kevin C. Karnes, “Afterword: After What?,” in Baltic Musics after the Post-Soviet, ed. Jeffers Engelhardt and Katherine Pukinskis (University of Tartu Press, 2024), 226-31 (https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/90965)

Kevin C. Karnes, “A German DJ, Postmodern Dreams, and the Ambivalent Politics of East-West Exchange at the First Exhibition of Approximate Art in Riga, April 1987,” ARTS: An Open-Access Journal 13/3 (2024) (https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/13/3/88)

Kevin C. Karnes, “Late Soviet Music in a Time of Russia’s War,” Russian Review 83 (2024): 134-36

Kevin C. Karnes, “Tintinnabuli and the Sacred: A View from the Archives, 1976-77,” Res Musica 14 (2022): 35-51 (https://dspace.ut.ee/server/api/core/bitstreams/ca3138ee-a5fc-413e-a6b3-c22c85c04696/content)

Kevin C. Karnes, Sounds Beyond: Arvo Pärt and the 1970s Soviet Underground (University of Chicago Press, 2021)

Kevin C. Karnes, “Disco Culture and the Ritual Journey in the Soviet 1980s,” Music Theory Online 27/3 (2021) (https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.21.27.3/mto.21.27.3.karnes.html)

Kevin C. Karnes, “Northern Light: Jāzeps Vītols, Cosmopolitan Nationalist on the Axis Riga–St. Petersburg,” in Music’s Nordic Breakthrough: Aesthetics, Modernity and Cultural Exchange, 1890-1930, ed. Philip Ross Bullock and Daniel M. Grimley (Boydell & Brewer), 215-32

Kevin C. Karnes, “History, Historicism, Historiography,” The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis (Oxford UP, 2020), 15-32

Kevin C. Karnes and Andrew J. Mitchell, “Schopenhauer’s Influence on Wagner,” The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer, ed. Robert L. Wicks (Oxford UP, 2020), 517-34