James Revell Carr, Ph.D – Soundtrack & Cultural Advisor

James Revell Carr, Ph.D. is the Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and Director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky. James is a folklorist and ethnomusicologist specializing in the music of seafaring cultures, particularly the music of nineteenth century whalers in Oceania and the West Coast of North America. In the 1990s he was the interpretive specialist at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park, and he has worked as an interpreter at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut and was guest curator at the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria, OR. He holds degrees from Hamilton College (BA, creative writing), the University of Oregon (MA, folklore) and he earned his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His first book, Hawaiian Music in Motion: Mariners, Missionaries, and Minstrels, about the role of sailors in the development of Hawaiian popular music in the nineteenth century, was awarded the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Alan P. Merriam Prize for outstanding book in ethnomusicology for 2015. His most recent work is a chapter titled, “That evening our men danced with the Indians: Musical Trade and Cultural Commerce in Pre-industrial Polynesia.” In the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Economic Ethnomusicology, edited by Anna Morcom.