Dr. Oded Erez studies popular music and film music, with an emphasis on Israel/Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean. He completed his doctorate in 2016 in the Department of Historical Musicology at UCLA, and did his post-doctoral studies at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows. In 2018- 2022 was a faculty member in the Music Department at Bar-Ilan University. He co-founded the Israeli chapter of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance  (ICTMD) - the principal forum for scholars of traditional and popular music in Israel - and also served as the secretary of the international Mediterranean Music Studies Group of the same organization.

His studies combine research methods from historical musicology, ethnomusicology and cultural studies, and deal with the connections between the political and the aesthetic. His publications have appeared in academic journals such as Popular Music, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the Journal of Levantine Studies, as well as in the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Israel and the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies. He is currently completing an ISF- funded project dedicated to the ethnography of Israeli wedding DJs and their audiences, and a book manuscript on popular music and the making of Israeli ethnicities.

Dr. Erez is the Department’s Undergraduate and Graduate Advisor.