Affiliated Faculty

<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Gurminder Kaur Bhogal is the Catherine Mills Davis Professor of Music at Wellesley College, where she teaches music history, theory, and analysis. A musicologist and practicing <strong><em>kirtaniya</em></strong>, her research spans two fields: the aesthetics of ornament in early twentieth-century French music and the traditions, instruments, and theories of Sikh devotional music (<strong><em>kirtan</em></strong>). She is the author of three books, a recipient of two major awards from the American Musicological Society, and Series Editor of the AMS Studies in Music monograph series.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Bhogal's most recent book, <strong><em>Sikh Kirtan and Its Journeys: Instruments, Theories, Technologies</em></strong> (University of Chicago Press, 2025), is the first comprehensive scholarly study of Sikh devotional music. The book examines <em><strong>kirtan</strong></em> alongside the writings of the Sikh Gurus and Bhagats and the practices of musicians across the global Sikh diaspora, tracing how colonization and migration have transformed canonical instruments, songs, and performance contexts. It gives sustained attention to marginal kirtan practitioners, including women and innovators developing digital techniques. The book is available in open access through BibliOpen. An accompanying website provides guided listening examples keyed to each chapter.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Her earlier work on Sikh music and art includes "Listening to Female Voices in Sikh Kirtan" (<strong>Sikh Formations</strong>, 2017), which won the Pauline Alderman Award for Outstanding Scholarship on Women in Music from the International Alliance for Women in Music. The article examines sound recordings by female <em><strong>kirtaniye</strong></em> to recover the contributions of women musicians sidelined in historical narratives about Panjab and addresses the contested role of raag, the gendered politics of vocal timbre, and the commercial dissemination of <em><strong>kirtan</strong></em>. "Tracking the Harmonium from Christian Missionary Hymns to Sikh Kirtan" (<strong><em>Yale Journal of Music and Religion</em></strong>, 2022) won the Roland Jackson Award in Music Analysis from the American Musicological Society in 2025. The article traces the instrument's journey from colonial missionary contexts into Sikh devotional practice and analyzes the implications of the recent harmonium ban at Harmandir Sahib. She has also published on Sikh art: "Anahad Naad and Pictorial Resonance: The Halo and Sonic Vibration in Sikh Art" (<strong><em>Sikh Research Journal</em></strong>, 2023) explores the relationship between the halo in Sikh painting and the concept of unstruck divine sound.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Bhogal's first research area centers on relationships between music and the visual arts in early twentieth-century Paris. <strong><em>Details of Consequence: Ornament, Music, and Art in Paris</em></strong> (Oxford University Press, 2013), published in the AMS Studies in Music series, examines how composers including Debussy, Ravel, Satie, and Fauré reimagined ornament in dialogue with developments in the decorative arts, drawing on feminist theory, nationalism, and orientalism. <strong><em>Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune</em></strong> (Oxford University Press, 2018), in the Oxford Keynotes series, offers an extended study of one of the most widely known works in the piano repertoire. Additional publications include "Orchestral Tissue, Subordinate Arabesques, and Turning Inward in Maurice Ravel's Boléro" (<strong><em>Music Theory Online</em></strong>, 2020) and "Ephemeral Arabesque Timbres and the Exotic Feminine" in <strong><em>Arabesque Without End: Across Music and the Arts</em></strong> (Routledge, 2021).</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Bhogal served as Review Editor for the <strong><em>Journal of the American Musicological Society</em></strong> from 2019 to 2022 and is currently Series Editor for the AMS Studies in Music monograph series. At Wellesley, she teaches courses including "The Symphony in the World," "Opera: Its History, Music, and Drama," "Sacred Sounds of South Asia," and "Expressing Race and Gender through New Music," several of which have received Mellon Foundation funding.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Bhogal trained as a pianist at the Royal College of Music and as a music historian at King's College London before completing her Ph.D. in Music History and Theory at the University of Chicago in 2004, with a dissertation on arabesque and metric dissonance in the music of Maurice Ravel. She has been at Wellesley since 2006.</p>

Sikh devotional music (kirtan): instruments, raag traditions, vocal practice, digital technologies, and the transformations of kirtan across the global Sikh diaspora. Women's voices and gendered performance practices in Sikh kirtan. The harmonium in Panjab and its contested place in Sikh devotional worship. Sound, vibration, and embodied perception in Sikh theology and art. Ornament, arabesque, and the relationship between music and the visual arts in early twentieth-century France, with emphasis on Debussy, Ravel, and the aesthetics of the decorative.