Aruna Kharod

Aruna Kharod is an Assistant Professor of Music at Bowdoin College, where she directs the South Asian Performing Arts Ensemble. A trained sitarist and bharatanatyam dancer, she brings both scholarly and practical expertise to her academic work in ethnomusicology.

Dr. Kharod received her BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Texas-Austin, building a strong foundation in South Asian studies and ethnomusicology. Her educational background is reflected in her comprehensive approach to researching Indian performing arts.

Her research focuses on the sociopolitical, material, and environmental histories of transnational Indian performing arts. She examines how changing networks of artisanship, curation, and performance have shaped the making and musics of sitars in and beyond India from 1800 onwards. Her work synthesizes ethnographic and archival research conducted in both India and the US, ranging from rural artisanal workshops to the Smithsonian collections. Dr. Kharod is particularly interested in labor and artisanship, museum studies, and the intersection of performing arts with diaspora communities. Her approach combines critical organology with material culture studies to understand how musical instruments function as cultural artifacts.

Dr. Kharod's scholarly contributions demonstrate a consistent focus on material culture, transnational connections, and the social dimensions of musical practice. Her publications reveal a progression from foundational work on Devanagari script and translation of classical poetry to more complex analyses of cultural infrastructure and artisan labor in musical instrument production. Her research increasingly addresses questions of equity and representation in folklife programming and museum curation.

Her research and public humanities projects have been supported by prestigious grants and fellowships:

• Fulbright Foundation
• Presser Foundation
• Humanities Texas
• Blanton Museum of Art
• Texas Folklife
• City of Austin

As an experienced leader in equity-oriented public humanities and arts programming, Dr. Kharod has developed significant mentoring initiatives across museum, non-profit, and academic settings. Her direction of Bowdoin's South Asian Performing Arts Ensemble creates a vital space for cultural expression, learning, and community building. This ensemble serves as both a pedagogical tool and a platform for cultural preservation and innovation, reflecting her commitment to applied ethnomusicology that bridges academic research with community engagement.