Professor Nicholas Cook has been awarded one of four British Academy Wolfson Research Professorships, which cover a range of projects in the humanities and social sciences.
Funded by the Wolfson Foundation, these awards fund replacement teaching over a three-year period, in addition to research expenses. Cook’s project is in the area of what he calls relational musicology: instead of focussing on the subjective experience of music, it focusses on the role that music plays in the construction and negotiation of relationships and identities among both individuals and groups. It will result in a book that combines perspectives from relational practice, sociology, and ethnomusicology with musicological practices of close reading; deploys ethnographical research methods alongside analysis of texts, scores, and performances; and ranges from Britain, South Africa, and the West Pacific Rim to the virtual communities and participatory cultures based on the internet. The aim is to show how the social is inscribed within the musical and vice versa. Cook will take up the Professorship in January 2014.