Dr Ross Cole

Profile

In my research I explore issues surrounding political imagination and critique, primarily in the context of popular music. This work has also led me to a sustained interest in poetics, attempting to understand not only what music means, but how it means. In 2024 I received a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize from the Leverhulme Trust (£100,000), awarded to outstanding researchers whose work has had international impact and whose future careers are exceptionally promising.

I read Music at Christ Church Oxford before pursuing postgraduate 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. In 2022–23 I served as Director of Postgraduate Research Studies.

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.

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 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) 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 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

I am interested in the politics and poetics of popular culture from the 19^th century to the present. My approach is defined by what I call an ‘ecological history of music’­, one that insistently cuts across disciplinary boundaries.

Qualifications

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

Professional memberships

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