Dr Ross Cole

Profile

My research explores intersections of music, political imagination, and modernity from the 19th century to the digital present. My work engages critically with folk and popular traditions, avant-garde aesthetics, and the cultural politics of sound. I am interested in how and why music constructs and contests identities—national, racial, classed—across diverse contexts. I have written about the ideological underpinnings of folk revivalism, the poetics of popular music, and the role of nostalgia and utopianism in digital aesthetics. My work also investigates the relationship between modernism and mass culture, drawing new 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 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 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, forthcoming 2025) 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, CRASSH, King’s College London, Nottingham, New York University, Oxford, University College Cork, and the Ilkley Literature Festival. I have also contributed to programmes on BBC Radio 4 and ABC Radio National (Australia). Together with Michiel Kamp of Utrecht University, I currently convene a research network on retrofuturism.

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 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.

Responsibilities

• Academic Personal Tutoring Lead

Research interests

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