Faculty Bio: Sam Cushman

Samuel Cushman is a musician, scholar, and educator based in upstate New York. His musical pursuits include drum kit (particularly funk, rock, and breakbeat drumming), Hindustani (North Indian) tabla and  pakhawaj, and Indonesian gamelan. He holds an M.A. (2017) and a Ph.D. (2023) in Music from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Like his creative practice, his research, teaching, and scholarship explore transcultural musical histories and encounters. As the recipient of a Fulbright-Nehru research grant, Sam spent most of 2022 living in New Delhi and researching rhythmic accompaniment for North Indian kathak dance. 

Sam’s dissertation, “From Calcutta to the Bengal Tiger: Indian Musicians, American Orientalism, and Cosmopolitan Modernism Pre-1947,” centers the musical lives of early-twentieth-century South Asian immigrants and situates them within sweeping cultural and political projects of the era, exploring transnational flows in both anticolonial and postcolonial histories, geopolitics, and cultural ecosystems. Along related thematic terrain, his first publication (2021) details the little-known friendship between Hindustani sarod maestro Ali Akbar Khan and philosopher Alan Watts, who helped Khan establish a college of Indian music in California at the height of the Bay Area sixties.