Dr Ross Cole

Profile

My research explores how music shapes historical consciousness from the 19th century to the digital present. I am interested in the ways music mediates relationships between memory, technology, modernity, and democratic life. My work ranges across folk and blues revivalism, popular song, the avant-garde, and internet aesthetics, asking how music becomes a site for negotiating the past and imagining alternative futures. Drawing on critical theory, media aesthetics, and postcolonial thought, I seek to develop an ecologically informed and politically engaged vision for music scholarship. In 2024 I received a Philip Leverhulme Prize, awarded to outstanding researchers whose work has had international impact.

I read Music at Christ Church Oxford before pursuing postgraduate work at York (MRes) and King’s College Cambridge (PhD). I then held a Lectureship in the Faculty of Music at Cambridge, and after that a Research Fellowship at Homerton College, where I also served as Director of Studies. I was appointed Lecturer at Leeds in 2022 and Associate Professor in 2025. In 2022–23 I served as Director of Postgraduate Research Studies.

My first book, The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (University of California Press, 2021), rethinks folk music as a political and aesthetic project. It won the Bruno Nettl Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology awarded to an outstanding publication on the history of the field. Reviews have described it 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 (Cambridge University Press, 2026) and co-editor of Remixing Music Studies: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Cook (Routledge, 2020). I am currently completing a book on vaporwave, examining affect, late capitalism, and the politics of online musical culture.

I have been invited to speak internationally, including at Cambridge, King’s College London, Université de Montréal, Nottingham, New York University, Oxford, Southampton, University College Cork, and Ilkley Literature Festival. I have also contributed to programmes on BBC Radio 4, NTS Radio, and ABC Radio National (Australia). Together with Michiel Kamp of Utrecht University, I convene a research network on Retrofuturism.

Recent articles appear in Ethnomusicology, Cultural Politics, Modernism/modernity, ASAP/Journal, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and Popular Music. My 2020 article ‘Vaporwave a e s t h e t i c s: Internet Nostalgia and the Utopian Impulse’ was given an Honourable Mention for the Royal Musical Association’s Jerome Roche Prize.

Research interests

My work engages critically with folk and popular traditions, avant-garde aesthetics, and the cultural politics of sound. My approach is defined by what I call an ‘ecological history of music’, one that insistently cuts across disciplinary boundaries and questions normative assumptions in music historiography.

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students.

Primary investigator (PI)

• Philip Leverhulme Prize

Qualifications

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

Professional memberships

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Current postgraduate researchers

• Hywel Morgan