Dr Ross Cole

I am an affiliated lecturer in music at the University of Cambridge. Previously I held a 5-year research fellowship at Homerton College, where I also served as director of studies. I completed my PhD with Nicholas Cook at King’s College Cambridge, an MRes at the University of York, and a BA at Christ Church Oxford, where I received the Gibbs Prize. I work on the history of popular and experimental traditions from the 19th century to the present.

My first book The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination was published in 2021 by University of California Press. I’m currently writing a second book, on utopian thought, provisionally entitled Soundscapes of Possibility: The Musical Poetics of Utopia.

My academic work has been published in ASAP/Journal, Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, among other places. Shorter pieces have appeared in The Conversation, ASAP/J, Musicology Now, and the Times Higher Education.

You can find me at rgc30@cam.ac.uk.

Books

• The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021). 
• Remixing Music Studies: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Cook, ed. Ananay Aguilar, Ross Cole, Matthew Pritchard, and Eric Clarke (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).

Peer-Reviewed Articles

• 'Disciplined Melancholy: On the Songs of Leonard Cohen.' Songwriting Studies Journal (forthcoming).
• 'Popular Song and the Poetics of Experience.' Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 146/1 (2021): 81–116.
• 'The Problem with AI Music: Song and Cyborg Creativity in the Digital Age.' Popular Music, 39/2 (2020): 332–338.
• 'Vaporwave a e s t h e t i c s: Internet Nostalgia and the Utopian Impulse.' ASAP/Journal, 5/2 (2020): 297–326.
• 'On the Politics of Folk Song Theory in Edwardian England.' Ethnomusicology, 63/1 (2019): 19–42.
• 'Vernacular Song and the Folkloric Imagination at the Fin de Siècle.' 19th-Century Music, 42/2 (2018): 73–95.
• 'Notes on Troubling "the Popular".' Popular Music, 37/3 (2018): 392–414.
• 'Mastery and Masquerade in the Transatlantic Blues Revival.' Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 143/1 (2018): 173–210.
• 'Industrial Balladry, Mass Culture, and the Politics of Realism in Cold War Britain.' Journal of Musicology, 34/3 (2017): 354–390.
• '"Sound Effects (O.K., Music)": Steve Reich and the Visual Arts in New York City, 1966–68.' Twentieth-Century Music, 11/2 (2014): 217–244.
• '"Fun, Yes, but Music?" Steve Reich and the San Francisco Bay Area’s Cultural Nexus, 1962–65.' Journal of the Society for American Music, 6/3 (2012): 315–348.

Book Chapters

• 'Stravinsky, Modernism, and Mass Culture.' In Stravinsky in Context, ed. Graham Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020): 230–237.
• 'Towards an Ecological History of Music.' In Remixing Music Studies, ed. Ananay Aguilar, Ross Cole, Matthew Pritchard, and Eric Clarke (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020): 194–209.
• ‘Introduction: A Hedgehog in Fox’s Clothing’ (with Pritchard and Aguilar). In Remixing Music Studies (2020): 1–15.
• '"Join that Troubled Chorus": Nick Cave, the Bad Seeds, and the Blues.' In Mute Records: Artists, Business, History, ed. Zuleika Beaven, Marcus O’Dair, and Richard Osborne (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019): 87–99.

Public Reports

• ‘Living Archives and Creative Engagement Online: An EIRA-funded Report on Digital Interactivity in the Performing Arts’ (2021), with Professor George McKay.

Other Writing

• 'The Conflicted Politics of Folk Music.' UC Press Blog, 19 October 2020.
• Book review: 'Rethinking Reich edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn.' Music & Letters, 101/2 (2020): 383–85.
• 'Musical Plagiarism: Why it can be Admirable to Steal.' The Conversation, 4 May 2020.
• ‘Turning Trash into Mantras: An Interview with Vaporwave Producer Strawberry Illuminati.’ ASAP/J online feature, 9 January 2020.
• ‘Folk Music and Fascism: A Divisive History.’ Musicology Now, 19 February 2019.
• ‘Who are the General Rippers of Higher Education?’ Times Higher Education, 19 November 2018.
• ‘The Threat of the Popular.’ Faculty of Music Research Blog, University of Cambridge, 19 October 2018.
• Book review: ‘Popular Music Matters: Essays in Honour of Simon Frith edited by Lee Marshall and Dave Laing.’ Music & Letters, 97/3 (2016): 532–34.
• Book review: ‘Pioneers of the Blues Revival by Steve Cushing.’ Music & Letters, 96/4 (2015): 679–81.