Founded in 1965 by Professor Alexander Ringer from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, the Musicology Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was the first department of its kind in Israel. Within a decade of its existence it boasted distinguish faculty members such as Israel Adler, Bathja Bayer, Josef Tal, Dalia Cohen, Ruth Katz (both Cohen and Katz were the 2012 recipients of the Israel Prize in music), Amnon Shiloah, Jehoash Hirshberg, Roger Kamien and Don Harrán. Then as in nowadays the Department seeks to advance interdisciplinary research of music as a multifaceted phenomenon whose manifestations proliferate across social, political, and ethnic borders. Classes in the Musicology Department focus on three major fields: historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory. Among the current faculty members are leading scholars in the fields of European art music (from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century), psycho-acoustics and cognition, Jewish musics, popular and folk music, musicological historiography, aesthetics, semiotics, and more.