Victor Anand Coelho is Professor of Music at Boston University and an Affiliate Member of the American and New England Studies Program. He is a graduate of Berkeley (BA) and UCLA (PhD), and a Fellow of Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. From 2007 to 2011, he was Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education at Boston University and produced the University's "One BU" report on undergraduate education.

A musicologist and performer of international distinction, he works primarily in the areas of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian music, as well as in popular music, media, and technology (for video, click here). His areas of research include music of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque, lute music, performance practice, interdisciplinary approaches, and cross-cultural perspectives. As a specialist on popular music, he is interested in African-American music, rock history, blues, improvisation, and performance issues, and has appeared on HBO, the CBC, WGBH, and MTV, as well as in newspapers, radio, and in documentary films as a specialist on the music of the Rolling Stones and the blues (watch Victor's "Blues 101" video).

He has held visiting appointments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1984-5), the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris (1990), the University of Melbourne (1992), and Cornell University (1995). In 2004 he was Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti in Florence. From 1986-2005 he taught at the University of Calgary, where he was named University Professor, and was cited as one of the university's "most popular profs" by the Maclean's Guide to Canadian Universities; he also won a teaching award from the Students' Union.

His books include Music and Science in the Age of Galileo (Kluwer), The Manuscript Sources of 17th-Century Italian Lute Music (Garland), Performance on Lute, Guitar, and Vihuela (Cambridge), and The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar. Current projects include a history of Renaissance instrumental music, with Keith Polk, and The Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones.

As a lutenist he has performed extensively throughout N. America and Europe, and he is co-director of the group Il Furioso, which specializes in Italian music of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In 2000 he received the Noah Greenberg Award given by the American Musicological Society for outstanding contributions to the performance of early music. His recordings as lutenist and director appear on the Stradivarius and Toccata Classics labels, and he is also the founder and one of the guitarists in the Rooster Blues Band, which has released two albums, Come on in my Kitchen and Bluestoons on the UCM label, and tours regularly with Chicago blues singer Lou Pride.