I am a musicologist who studies music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular interest in American vernacular music and the prospect of a materialist musicology. My research conceives of music in this period as bearing determinate forms of historical consciousness.
A current book project, "In Search of Ragtime," theorizes ragtime music and its afterlives as a musical mediation of American industrial capitalism. From the emergence of ragtime in the Gilded Age, to its revival in the economic turmoil of the 1970s, my book charts transformations in musical value and social structure, revealing how ragtime enabled and frustrated historically specific fantasies of belonging and collectivity.
My other projects include studies of music and sound in cinema verité, love songs in periods of social transformation, and the musical semiotics of post-war pop music.