News
Georgina Born appointed Professor of Music and Anthropology
The Faculty of Music is delighted to annouce the appointment of Georgina Born as Professor of Music and Anthropology from 1 October 2010. Professor Born will direct a five-year programme of research entitled 'Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies' ('MusDig') with funding of €1.7m from a prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grant.
The MusDig project, led by Professor Born, will have two main dimensions: (1) an ambitious programme of comparative ethnographic research on the fundamental changes to music and musical practices afforded by digitization, which have not yet been researched by musicology; (2) an innovative theoretical programme which, with reference to this empirical research as well as to the anthropology and sociology of music, musicology and media theory, intends to develop a new interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework for contemporary music studies.
Professor Born trained in Anthropology at University College London and worked subsequently at Goldsmiths College, University of London. From 1997-2010 she taught and conducted research at the University of Cambridge, most recently as Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Music in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences. Her research uses ethnography to study cultural production, particularly music, television, IT, and knowledge systems. Her research interests include: cultural production, cultural politics and cultural institutions (high cultural, museums and media organizations); the anthropology and sociology of music and art; modernism and postmodernism in music and art; digitization and new media; music and technology, music and digitization; theories of the avant-garde; creativity, authorship, and intellectual property; interdisciplinarity; art-science; post-Bourdieuian cultural theory; post-Adornian critical theory; theories of mediation, materiality, and genre; ethnography; media policy and media regulation; public service broadcasting; television - including drama, documentary, news and current affairs.
Professor Born's publications include Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (Vintage 2005), the first comprehensive ethnography (or inside study) of the BBC in the context of Britain's public service broadcasting system, focused on its transformation by neo-liberal policies in the decade from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s; Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (California 1995), a critical study, combining ethnography and history, of the musical avant-garde and of music-science collaborations at Pierre Boulez's IRCAM in Paris; and Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music (edited with D. Hesmondhalgh, California 2000), a pioneering volume that brought poststructuralist theories to musicology. Forthcoming publications include Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences (edited with A. Barry, Routledge 2011), a result of Professor Born's collaborative ESRC-funded research on interdisciplinary research practices; and Music, Sound, and the Transformation of Public and Private Space (edited with T. Rice, Cambridge University Press 2011).
Professor Born is engaged in cultural policy and media policy work on the BBC, public service broadcasting and the cultural sector in Britain and Europe. She is a member of the European Research Council's Social Sciences and Humanities expert panels. She is Honorary Professor of Anthropology at University College London, a Fellow of Yale University's Center for Cultural Sociology, and an International Fellow of the Australian Sociological Association. In 2008 she was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association for her contributions to music research. She will hold the Bloch Professorship in Music at the University of California, Berkeley in 2011-12.