Professor Sarah Hill

Dr Hill entered the field of popular music studies from a background in classical musicology, with a study of the relationship between post-war popular music and fifty years of political activism around the survival of the Welsh language. Her most recent book, San Francisco and the Long 60s (Bloomsbury, 2016) is a sustained microhistory of the Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, the development of the psychedelic musical culture in the years 1963-69, and an assessment of the legacy of the hippie era in the present day Bay Area. Some of the ethnographic material that Dr Hill collected for that book was the basis for a Radio 2 documentary, A Taste of Summer, which focused on the myth of the Summer of Love.

Dr Hill is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Progressive Rock (forthcoming 2021), and conducting research for a study of women rock critics and second-wave feminism in the 1970s. Her next publication will be an edited collection of short essays on one-hit wonders, which aims to offer a capsule history of changing popular music tastes, the inescapably mainstream, and the often maligned.

One-Hit Wonders: An Alternative History of Popular Music (New York and London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2021)

‘Counterculture and Youth Culture: Drifts, Events, Music, Echoes’, in Andy Bennett, ed., The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Youth Culture (New York and London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2020)

‘1968: Mythology Matters’, twentieth-century music 16/1 (2019): 165-168.

‘Un Naw Chwech Wyth’, Journal of Communication Inquiry 42/3 (2018): 300-305.

‘Peripheral Identities on Desert Island Discs and Beti a’i Phobol,’ in Nicholas Cook, Julie Brown and Stephen Cottrell, eds., Defining the Discographic Self, Proceedings of the British Academy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)

San Francisco and the Long 60s (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2016)

‘Minority Language, Majority Canon,’ Popular Music History 7/3 (2013): 283–300.

‘Ending It All: Genesis and Revelation,’ Popular Music 32/2 (2013): 199–224.

‘”This Is My Country”: American Popular Music and Political Engagement in 1968,’ in Barley Norton and Beate Kutschke, eds., Music and Protest in 1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 46–63

‘Mary Hopkin and the Deep Throat of Culture,’ in Laurie Stras, ed., She’s So Fine:  Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence, and Class in 1960s Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 163–182

‘Blerwytirhwng?’ The Place of Welsh Popular Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)

‘When Deep Soul Met the Love Crowd: Otis Redding at the Monterey Pop Festival, June 16-18, 1967,’ in Ian Inglis, ed., Performance and Popular Music: History, Place And Time (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 28–40

‘Beyond Borders: The Female Welsh Pop Voice,’ Radical Musicology 1/1 (2006)

historiography of 20th-century popular music, Welsh-language popular music, the cultural history of psychedelic music in San Francisco, progressive rock, female vocality, and popular music and cultural identity.