Presenters

Daniel Avorgbedor
Daniel Avorgbedor’s areas of expertise include urban ethnomusicology, cross-cultural aesthetics, contemporary African church music, and the African presence in black diasporic communities. He is associate professor of music and black studies at Ohio State University (OSU). After completing his doctorate in ethnomusicology at Indiana University (Bloomington), he taught at the University of Ghana, Bretton Hall College (Leeds, UK), and City College of New York. Professor Avorgbedor also served as editor of RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1989-95. He received major research grants that include the Wenner-Gren, H.F. Guggenheim, and NEH (team) awards. His education includes a PhD in ethnomusicology (Indiana University) an MA (Truman University, and General diploma, music, University of Ghana, Legon.

Roberta King
Roberta King is associate professor of communication and ethnomusicology in the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller Seminary. Since coming to Fuller in 2000, she has served as All-Seminary Chapel director and developed a new curriculum for “Ethnomusicology in Mission” at the MA level.

After studying music at the undergraduate and graduate levels, King began her missionary career in Kenya at Daystar Communications, now Daystar University. While there, she recognized the power of music to communicate the gospel profoundly within varying cultural contexts. King has published A Time to Sing: A Manual for the African Church (1999), and articles in journals such as Missiology. She is also a regular contributor to Worship Leader magazine and EthnoDoxology, the journal of the International Council of EthnoDoxologists, an organization which she helped to found and now serves on both its Founders and Academic Programs committees.

Brian Schrag
Since becoming a member of Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) International in 1990, Brian Schrag has performed sustained ethnographic and ethnomusicological research in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon, and has been instrumental in the development of SIL's ethnomusicology training programs and publications. He is currently SIL's International Ethnomusicology Coordinator, and holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology (UCLA), an M.A. in Intercultural Studies (Wheaton), and a B.S. in Cognitive Sciences (Brown University).