The Seeger Lecturer at the 39th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology will be Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.

Born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett studied English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received the A.B. and M.A. degrees. Her doctorate in folklore was completed at the Folklore Institute, Indiana University. At New York University, she is Professor of Performance Studies in the Tisch School of the Arts and Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. She is also Research Associate at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

She has served as President of the American Folklore Society and Chair of the Board of City Lore: The New York Center for Urban Folk Culture.

Her honors include the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1986-87), citation by the Library of Congress for having produced one of the best sound recordings of folklore and folksong in the United States during 1986 (documentary field recordings of folksongs in the East European Jewish tradition), Lindback Award for Teaching Excellence (University of Pennsylvania), and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, New York Council for the Humanities, and others. In 1991-92, she was J. Paul Getty Scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities.

She teaches and writes on museums, tourism, and heritage politics, as well as on emergent culture in new technologies. Her publications include Image Before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864-1939 /(with Lucjan Dobroszycki), which formed the basis for a major museum exhibition and feature documentary film, and recently, articles on the Los Angeles Festival of the Arts, the Ellis Island Restoration, bad taste, and kitchen Judaism. Books in progress include an intellectual history of Jewish folklore and ethnology.