Elizabeth J. Markham

Elizabeth Markham (Ph.D. University of Cambridge, England) is Professor Emeritus at the University of Arkansas. She is an historical ethnomusicologist working on music and culture in East Asia with a focus on the court and temple arts in medieval Japan. She is particularly interested in comparative music theory and musical analysis, prosody and melody in poetry, chant and song, and the oral and the written in performance and transmission. Before going to the University of Arkansas in 2000 she held research positions as Research Fellow at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge (England), Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Würzburg (Germany), and Leverhulme Fellow at the Queen's University of Belfast (Ireland). She spent a year of fieldwork-apprenticeship as a novice in the gagaku orchestra of Kasuga Taisha in Nara (Japan), has undertaken ethnomusicological field-work and archival research in Japan, China, and Europe, and spent longer term visiting residencies at Kyoto University's Research Institute for the Humanities and as Visiting Fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge