Event Detail

Professor of Music and Anthropology at Oxford University Georgina Born will discuss the anthropology and sociology of music and culture, with a focus on the way digital media impacts music today.

 

Born studied anthropology for her undergraduate and doctorate degrees at University College London during the 1980s. Having trained as a classical cellist, she was the bass player for the avant-rock group Henry Cow and also played jazz, contemporary and improvised music with various jazz groups and with Derek Bailey's Company. She has taught at world-leading universities including both Cambridge and Oxford in departments of media and communication, sociology and music. Her work is highly interdisciplinary, spanning music of the 20th and 21st centuries (see her five-year research program MusDig) as well as digital media, social and cultural theory and ethnographies of cultural production. Her books include 2005's Uncertain Vision, the first-ever inside study of the BBC, and Rationalizing Culture, her 1995 study of Pierre Boulez's IRCAM. Her edited books include Western Music and Its Others (2000), Music, Sound, and Space (2013) and the forthcoming Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, expected out in 2017.