Derek Katz is an Associate Professor of Music History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he received his PhD in 2000. He also holds a degree from Harvard, and has studied at The Free University of Berlin on a Fulbright Fellowship. A specialist in Czech music, his book Janáček Beyond the Borders was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2009.
His more recent work deals with the reception of ragtime and early jazz in Central Europe, and he is beginning a project on the intersection of institutional support, modernism and professional string quartets in the United States in the mid-20th Century.
Katz has also written for The New York Times and the San Francisco Opera and spoken at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. He is an enthusiastic amateur violist and chamber music player.