Academic Interests
I recently finished writing a book about how the musical world is responding to climate crisis. There are many positive developments: records made of sugar, stereos that run on sunshine, custom carbon calculators, playlists for the planet, and much more. At the same time, some stubborn political and economic realities threaten to turn even the best solutions back into the problems they want to solve. I highlight what is good about the good things. I present a political argument for why the not-so-good things are not so good. And I suggest what additional changes might authorize the boldest plans for rescuing the future of music—along with everything else. The book will be published by Verso in 2025.
Previously, I wrote a book called Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (2019). It shows that recorded music has always exploited natural and human resources, and that its reliance on those resources is more damaging today than ever before. The book received the IASPM International Book Prize, the IASPM-Canada Book Prize, and a PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers. It was an Honorable Mention for the IASPM-US Woody Guthrie Award.
I coedited a related book called Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media (2021). It looks at the mediated social lives and social deaths of various musical commodities and practices in industrializing and industrialized parts of the world. The book received the Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Most of my other publications have been about histories, cultures, and theories of sound reproduction. I coedited Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound (2015) and I coauthored work on gender and social inequalities in music technology for Twentieth-Century Music (2015) and the Contemporary Music Review (2016).
Music sociology is my other main interest—especially the field's pasts and prospects—and here I coedited The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music (2015).
Teaching and Supervision
I’m always happy to hear from prospective students working in my main fields of interest. I encourage projects that are conceptually adventurous, politically engaged, and empirically grounded. Some of my teaching contributions include:
- Music and the Environment
- Music, Technology, and Society
- Musikkvitenskapens forskningsfelt
- Music and Cultural Studies
- Research Seminar in Popular Music
- Metodologisk emne: Musikk, kultur, samfunn
- Popular Music and Dust: Archives, Memory, Heritage, Historiography
- Thesis Seminar in Musicology
- Film Music
Background
Before joining the University of Oslo in 2015, I taught at City University of London and Worcester College, University of Oxford. At Oxford, I also worked with the Music and Digitization Research Group.