A historian, educator, musicologist and jazz musician, Dr. Starr taught at Princeton and founded the Kennan Institute in Washington before serving as Vice President of Tulane University and, for eleven years, President of Oberlin College.
He now serves as founding Chairman the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Washington and is planning a new university for the Aga Kahn. Starr's books on New Orleans include Southern Comfort, an architectural and social history of the Garden District; Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a biography of the New Orleans composer who anticipated ragtime by half a century; and New Orleans Unmasqued, a collection of essays. Since 1980 Starr has headed the Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble, affiliated with the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane and called by the late Al Rose "The most authentic band on the scene today." The LRJE was the first jazz group to receive the Smithsonian Institution's Doubleday Prize, the first to appear at the Grammy Awards, and has performed and recorded across America, Europe, & Asia. For years Starr has been restoring the historic Lombard Plantation in New Orleans' Ninth Ward.
• Bamboula: The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1972)
• Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia (1972)
• Melkinov: Solo Architect in a Mass Society (1981)
• Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union: 1917
1991 (1983)
• New Orleans Unmasqued (1985)
• Southern Comfort: The Garden District of New Orleans
