Alison Arnold

Lecturer - Distant Education

Assistant Teaching Professor in Arts Studies

Department of Performing Arts and Technology

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Price Music Center NA

Bio

Dr. Alison Arnold is a Lecturer in the Department of Performing Arts and Technology. She retired from on-campus teaching in May 2023 and continues to co-teach an online world music course with her colleague, retired Emeritus Professor Jonathan Kramer. Dr. Arnold taught at The Colorado College, Penn State University at Abington, Drexel University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before joining NC State University in 2000. She completed her bachelor’s Honours Degree in Music at the University of Liverpool, England, and her master’s and Ph.D. in Musicology with a concentration in Ethnomusicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is an active performer of Irish and Scottish music. Since 2005, she has run the Irish Session at NC State, a weekly gathering of musicians who play traditional Irish and Scottish tunes.

As an ethnomusicologist, she has carried out research, presented conference papers, and published articles on Bollywood and Indian popular music, Asian Indian music in the United States, and Vietnamese Montagnard music in North Carolina. In 2023 she published the 2nd edition of her world music textbook, What In The World Is Music? (Routledge), co-authored with Dr. Jonathan Kramer. She edited the South Asia Volume of The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (Taylor & Francis, 2000), and before moving to the U.S. she served on the editorial staff of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Macmillan, 1980).