C. Michael Hawn, F.H.S., is the University Distinguished Professor of Church Music and Director of the Master of Sacred Music Program at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. He joined the faculty in 1992 after teaching for fifteen years in two Southern Baptist seminaries and serving congregations as minister of music in Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. Dr. Hawn has received numerous fellowships for the study of global hymnody and worship, and has conducted research and taught in forty countries. His publications include over 400 articles and books. Since 2004 he has written a weekly column entitled "History of Hymns" for the United Methodist Reporter. Hawn contributed over twenty entries to the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology (2013), primarily in the area of sub-Saharan African hymnody. In 2006, Michael Hawn was the music director for the Ninth Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He was elected Fellow of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada in 2008.