Dr Ross Cole

Profile

I read Music at Christ Church Oxford before pursuing graduate research at York and King’s College Cambridge, where I completed my PhD. I then held a Temporary Lectureship in the Faculty of Music at Cambridge, and after that a Junior Research Fellowship at Homerton College, where I also served as Director of Studies. I was appointed Lecturer in Popular Music at Leeds in 2022.

While at Cambridge I co-convened the ‘Auralities’ research network at CRASSH and was involved in leading a major redesign of the undergraduate music curriculum. I have been invited to speak internationally, including at Cambridge, King’s College London, Leeds, Nottingham, New York University, Oxford, University College Cork, and on ABC Radio National.

I am author of The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (University of California Press, 2021), which won the Bruno Nettl Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology, awarded to ‘an outstanding publication contributing to or dealing with the history of the field’. Reviews have described the book as ‘definitive’ (Music & Letters), ‘richly informed’ (Twentieth-Century Music), and ‘a wake-up call’ (Ethnomusicology Forum). I am also editor of The Cambridge Companion to Folk Music (under contract with Cambridge University Press), and co-editor of Remixing Music Studies: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Cook (Routledge, 2020).

Recent articles are published or forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, ASAP/Journal, Ethnomusicology, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Popular Music, 19th-Century Music, and Music & Letters. My 2020 article ‘Vaporwave aesthetics: Internet Nostalgia and the Utopian Impulse’ was given an honourable mention for the RMA’s Jerome Roche Prize.

Responsibilities

• Interim Director of Postgraduate Research Studies
• Academic Personal Tutoring Lead
• Faculty Athena Swan SAT

Research interests

My work revolves around understanding the politics and poetics of popular culture. I’m particularly interested in moments of profound change, whether the fin de siècle, the 1960s, or the present. Although wide-ranging, my research is unified by a number of recurrent themes: nostalgia, radical politics, modernity, race, imagination, song, experimentalism, and the vernacular. My approach is defined by what I call ‘an ecological history of music’­—one that cuts insistently across disciplinary boundaries. I welcome potential PhD students who wish to work in or around these areas with me.

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Any research projects I'm currently working on will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Qualifications

• PhD, University of Cambridge
• MRes, University of York
• BA (Hons), University of Oxford
• LRSM Saxophone

Professional memberships

• Royal Musical Association
• British Forum for Ethnomusicology
• International Association for the Study of Popular Music
• American Musicological Society
• Society for Ethnomusicology
• International Council for Traditional Music

<h4>Postgraduate research opportunities</h4> <p>We welcome enquiries from motivated and qualified applicants from all around the world who are interested in PhD study. Our <a href="https://phd.leeds.ac.uk">research opportunities</a> allow you to search for projects and scholarships.</p>