Department of Music

Musicologist and pianist Assaf Shelleg is the 2011-12 Israeli Visiting Assistant Professor in the Jewish Studies Program at UVA. From 2009-11 he was the Efroymson Visiting Israeli Scholar in the Department of Jewish, Islamic & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Washington University in St. Louis. Shelleg researches twentieth-century Jewish and Israeli art music, focusing on the migration of musical idioms associated with Jewishness and their acquired meanings in Europe, America, mandatory Palestine, and Israel. These topics are dealt with in his articles as well as in his forthcoming book,  Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History. In addition to his academic career, Shelleg performs mainly as a soloist with the repertoire he is researching and has toured Europe and the US with solo recitals of modern and postmodern music.