Dr Ross Cole

Profile

My research explores the intersection of music and political imagination from the 19th century to the digital present. I am particularly interested in entanglements between modernity, mass culture, and critique. I have written about folk and blues revivalism, the poetics of popular song, and the role of nostalgia in internet aesthetics. My work also rethinks connections between avant-garde movements and democratic life. I take an interdisciplinary approach informed by critical theory, postcolonial thought, and media aesthetics, and continue to develop an ecological and politically engaged vision for the future of 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.

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 on 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 (Cambridge University Press, 2026) and co-editor of Remixing Music Studies: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Cook (Routledge, 2020).

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 Modernism/modernity, ASAP/Journal, Ethnomusicology, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Popular Music, 19th-Century Music, and Music & Letters. 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.

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