Elizabeth D. Tolbert is a professor of musicology and director of the Ethnomusicology Program at the Conservatory of the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. She holds a joint appointment in the anthropology department at JHU’s Kreiger School of Arts and Sciences. Her research interests include music and evolution, feminist theory and gender, music and language ideologies, ritual, and music cognition. A pianist with a bachelor’s degree from Florida State University, she earned a master of music degree in piano performance from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1988. Dr. Tolbert began her teaching career as a visiting assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Northwestern University. She was appointed an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at New York University a year later. She moved on to Cornell University as a Mellon Fellow in 1992 and joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1993. She also has been a visiting professor of the anthropology of music at the University of Pennsylvania, a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, and a visiting fellow at Cambridge’s Wolfson College. Dr. Tolbert has held a National Endowment for the Humanities Aesthetics Institute Fellowship and a faculty development grant from Johns Hopkins. A member of the board of directors of the Society of Ethnomusicology, which named a prize in her honor, she was the co-founder of the Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology and has served as managing editor of Camera Obscura, assistant editor of UCLA Ethnomusicology Publications, on the editorial board of Music, Culture, and Society, and as an editorial consultant to Musiikin Suunta. Dr. Tolbert has published some twenty papers in scholarly journals or in volumes of collected works and is completing a book entitled Music, Meaning, and the Birth of Representation: Music Ideologies in Contemporary Evolutionary Discourses.