Kevin Fellezs

Kevin Fellezs is an Associate Professor of Music and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. His work focuses on the relationship between popular music and identity, particularly within African-, Asian-, and Pacific Islander-American communities. He has written on a wide range of music from jazz to Hawaiian slack key guitar to heavy metal to enka (a Japanese popular music genre). His book titled Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion (Duke University Press) is a study of fusion (jazz-rock-funk) music of the 1970s framed by insights drawn from popular music studies, jazz studies, and ethnic studies. Birds of Fire is the co-winner of the 2012 Woody Guthrie Book Award from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch (IASPM-US) for the most distinguished English language monograph in popular music studies published during 2011. His second book, Listen But Don't Ask Question: Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Across the TransPacific (Duke University Press, 2019), is a transnational study of contemporary Hawaiian slack key guitar as performed by Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and non-Hawaiian guitarists in Hawai'i, Japan, and California. Fellezs has published articles in Jazz Perspectives, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Metal Music Studies, and the Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter. He has also published essays in a number of edited anthologies including Alien Encounters: Asian Americans and Popular Culture (Duke University, 2007), Yellow Power-Yellow Soul: The Radical Art of Fred Ho (University of Illinois, 2013), Heavy Metal: Controversies and Countercultures (Equinox, 2013), and The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter (Cambridge University, 2016). Fellezs serves on the editorial boards for the Journal for Metal Music Studies, and the 33 1/3 Japan series. Fellezs received his B.A. (Music, with an emphasis in jazz studies, 1998) and M.A. (Humanities, 2000) from San Francisco State University. He earned his doctorate from the University of California, Santa Cruz (History of Consciousness [American Studies], 2004). In 2004-6, he was a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Music department at the University of California, Berkeley.