School of Music lecturer awarded prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize

Dr Ross Cole, Lecturer in Popular Music, has been awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize from the Leverhulme Trust

Philip Leverhulme Prizes have been offered since 2001 in commemoration of the contribution to the work of the Trust made by Philip Leverhulme, the Third Viscount Leverhulme and grandson of William Hesketh Lever, the founder of the Trust. The prizes recognise and celebrate the achievements of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future careers are exceptionally promising.

Chosen from over 350 nominations, the Leverhulme Trust offered five prizes in each of the following subject areas for 2024: Classics, Earth Sciences, Physics, Politics and International Relations, Psychology, and Visual and Performing Arts.

Dr Cole is one of five recipients in the category of Visual and Performing Arts.

Professor Barbara Kelly, Head of School of Music, said:

‘Dr Ross Cole is ideally suited to be a recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize. He has made an outstanding and highly original contribution to the fields of folk and popular music. He was awarded the Bruno Nettl Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology (2022) for his monograph The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (2021), and given an Honourable Mention for the Jerome Roche Prize, Royal Musical Association (2021) for ‘Vaporwave aesthetics: Internet Nostalgia and the Utopian Impulse’, ASAP/Journal (2020). His plans for his second monograph, Vaporwave, or, A Requiem for the Future, will take this reputation and contribution to the next level and help to define this rapidly developing field.’

Professor Anna Vignoles, Director of the Leverhulme Trust, said:

'Now in its twenty-third year, this scheme continues to attract applications from extraordinarily high calibre researchers. Selecting only thirty winners gets more challenging each year, and we are immensely grateful to the reviewers and panel members who helped us in our decision-making. This year, the Trust has awarded prizes to academics working on an impressive breadth of topics, from ancient linguistics to the macroevolution of fossil fishes, cross-cultural diversity in learning to fashion and sustainability, political anthropology of the Middle East to climate physics. We are incredibly proud to support these researchers through the next stage of their careers.'

Each prize is worth £100,000 and may be used for any purpose that advances the prize winner’s research.