Campus News
Announcing Associate Campus Provost
Dard Neuman, associate professor of music and the Kamil and Talat Hasan Endowed Chair in Classical Indian Music, will play a key role in evaluating academic resource allocation models and advancing strategic initiatives that will help address the campus budget deficit.
Dear Campus Community,
I am pleased to announce that Dard Neuman, associate professor of music and the Kamil and Talat Hasan Endowed Chair in Classical Indian Music, has joined my office as associate campus provost.
In this part-time position, Dard will play a key role in evaluating academic resource allocation models and advancing strategic initiatives that will help address the campus budget deficit.
Dard brings extensive leadership experience to this role. As chair of the Music Department for six years, he led a comprehensive curriculum overhaul, increased support for doctoral students, and helped recruit key faculty members. During a three-year term as chair of the Senate Committee on Planning and Budget, Dard played a pivotal role in developing data-informed frameworks for faculty hiring and campus resource allocations, while also contributing to systemwide efforts to strengthen graduate education through service on groups such as the Joint Working Group on Graduate Education (JWG) and the Implementation Task Force for Inclusive Excellence (ITF). Now in his third year as associate dean of graduate student success in the Graduate Division, Dard has continued this work by advancing major recommendations from the JWG and ITF. He also co-founded and co-directed the Center for South Asian Studies for three years, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, fundraising, and public engagement.
Dard received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University and joined the Music faculty at UC Santa Cruz in 2005. His research explores the politics of creativity in Hindustani music, focusing on how marginalized hereditary musicians have cultivated, contested, and transformed classical knowledge systems through oral, embodied, and performance-based practices. His recent work focuses on making oral melodic traditions both empirically and computationally analyzable at the melodic, rhythmic, syllabic, and textual levels. Supported by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, with additional contributions from UC Santa Cruz’s Office of Research and the Arts Research Institute, he has led the development of the Interactive Digital Transcription and Analysis Platform (IDTAP)—a live, public-facing tool that opens new pathways for digital humanities, ethnomusicology, and AI-informed research grounded in creative reasoning and the aesthetic epistemologies of oral traditions.
Please join me in welcoming Dard to this important role.
Sincerely,
Paul
Paul Koch
Interim Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor