About the Author

Sean Williams has taught ethnomusicology, Irish Studies, and Asian Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, since 1991, retiring from full-time teaching in 2026. Her degrees include a BA in classical guitar performance (University of California at Berkeley), an MA in ethnomusicology with a focus on Irish sean-nós singing (University of Washington), and a PhD in ethnomusicology with a focus on tembang Sunda, the sung poetry of West Java, Indonesia (University of Washington). She plays with grammar (Captain Grammar Pants is her alter ego on Facebook), enhances her skills by playing geography games daily, and has sung in composer Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir since 2012 (and in real life at Carnegie Hall in 2022 and Lincoln Center in 2025). In addition to her many articles, her monographs and edited volumes include The Sound of the Ancestral Ship: Highland Music of West Java (Oxford, 2001); The Ethnomusicologists’ Cookbook, vols. 1 and 2 (Routledge, 2006 and 2016); The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Southeast Asia and The Handbook of Southeast Asian Music with Terry E. Miller (Routledge, 1998 and 2008); Bright Star of the West: Joe Heaney, Irish Song Man with Lillis Ó Laoire (Oxford, 2011); English Grammar: 100 Tragically Common Mistakes (and How to Correct Them) (Zephyros Press, 2019); Irish Traditional Music, 1st and 2nd editions (Routledge, 2010 and 2020); and Musics of the World (Oxford, 2022).