Teaching
I am jointly appointed to the Faculty of Media and Information Studies and the Department of Music History in the Don Wright Faculty of Music. In FIMS, I teach in the undergraduate program in Media, Information and Technoculture and the Graduate Program in Media Studies. My MIT classes explore popular music and its intersections with subjectivity and with the products of other culture industries. My classes for the DWFOM explore the cultural history of genres and performers as well as the historical and current music industry. I am closely involved with launching and implementing Western’s new interdisciplinary M.A. in Popular Music and Culture.
Research
My research interests span several areas, all of them unified by a link to popular music. I have published several articles about how gender is constructed by and in the material practices of popular music cultures. I am currently at work on a book for Duke University Press about popular music on American network television from 1956, when Elvis Presley burst on the cultural scene, to 1981, when the cable channel was introduced. The book is a cultural and industrial history that focuses on the interaction and interchange between the music and television industries during formative times in the development of both. I am interested in the influence each had on the other in terms of production, content, and representation. My future projects, currently in the formative stages, include a cultural history of periodic outbursts of "years of the women" in popular music and criticism, and an exploration of age, subjectivity, and popular music.
Representative Publications:
"Teenyboppers, Groupies, and Other Grotesques: Girls and Women and Rock Culture in the 1960s and early 1970s," Journal of Popular Music Studies, volume 15, number 1, 2003.
"The Demonization of Courtney Love," in 'Bad' Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America, eds. Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, NYU Press, 1998.
"'Can't We Just Talk About Music?': Rock and Gender on the Internet," in Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory, ed. Thomas Swiss, John Sloop and Andrew Herman, Blackwell Publishers, 1997.
"(R)evolution Now? Rock and the Political Potential of Gender,” in Sexing The Groove: Popular Music and Gender, ed. Sheila Whiteley, Routledge, 1997.
"If Anything, Blame Woodstock: The Rolling Stones, Altamont, 6 December 1969," in Performance and Popular Music: History, Place and Time, ed. Ian Inglis, Ashgate Publishing, 2006.
Rocking the Wasteland: A Cultural History of Popular Music on American Network Television from Elvis to MTV (tentative title), Duke University Press, forthcoming.