Jeff Todd Titon

Jeff Todd Titon is a musician, organic gardener, and retired professor who taught American literature, folklore and ethnomusicology at Tufts University (1971-86) and at Brown University (1986-2013) where he led the PhD program in ethnomusicology. He attended Trinity School (Manhattan) and graduated from Westminster High School (Atlanta), Amherst College, and the University of Minnesota where he got the MA in English and PhD in American Studies. He's maintained a blog (https://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com) since 2008, writing about music, sound and sustainability, aimed at the general public.

In the academic world Jeff was a popular lecturer who taught undergraduate courses on American folk and popular music including blues, bluegrass, and country music; and from 1982-2013 he led an old-time string band ethnomusicology ensemble at his universities, teaching fiddle, banjo, and guitar. Jeff also taught undergraduate courses in American studies, American literature, ethnomusicology, visual documentation, and computer representations of people making music, using hypertext and multimedia. At Tufts he co-founded the MA program in ethnomusicology, and the undergraduate program in American studies. At Brown he also taught advanced graduate seminars in ethnomusicology and cultural theory, and advised many students in writing PhD dissertations.

A foundational figure in his generation in folklore and ethnomusicology, Jeff is known to his academic colleagues as a pioneer in phenomenological approaches to ethnographic research and writing, as a pioneer in establishing the field of applied ethnomusicology; for introducing an ecological approach to musical and cultural sustainability to folklorists and ethnomusicologists; and for his most recent project, a sound ecology. In 2020 the American Folklore Society gave Jeff their Lifetime Scholarly Achivement Award. Still active as a lecturer, visiting professor, writer and musician in his so-called retirement, his most recent book is TOWARD A SOUND ECOLOGY: New and Selected Essays (Indiana University Press, 2020). He also has a CD that can be heard, bought in physical format, or downloaded, on Amazon; it's called FIDDLE TUNES FOR SLACK KEY GUITAR (2018).