An ethnomusicologist and a scholar of Urdu and Hindi language and literature and of the art music of India and Pakistan, Regula Qureshi has given numerous lecture-recitals on sarangi, Indian music, and Muslim chant in Canada, the United States, Pakistan, India, and Western Europe. She was born in Switzerland and became a Canadian in 1968 when she followed her husband, a political scientist from India, to the University of Alberta. She studied sarangi with Ustad Hamid Hussain 1968-69 and with Ustad Sabri Khan 1984-85.
While a research associate with the Provincial Museum and Archives of Alberta in the 1970s, she collected and recorded examples of the province's ethnic folk music and established the Ethnic Folk Music Collection. She joined the University of Alberta's music department as a McTaggart Fellow in 1983, and subsequently became an adjunct professor in the departments of anthropology (1991), religious studies (1992), and East Asian studies (1993), and was associate dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research 1994-96. Qureshi founded the University of Alberta's Centre for Ethnomusicology in 1992, which was renamed the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology in 2002.
Qureshi was awarded the Jaap Kunst Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology in 1968 for the article "Tarannum: The Chanting of Urdu Poetry." In 1995 she was granted a Killam Annual Professorship from the University of Alberta; and in 1996 she received a fine arts award from Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
Learn more:
Regula Qureshi in The Canadian Encyclopedia
Transplanting Hindustani Music to Canada