David Novak is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara (with affliiations in Anthropology, Film and Media Studies, and East Asian Langages and Cultural Studies) and Director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music. His work explores the relationship between modern cultures and the circulation of musical media. His interests include globalization of popular music, remediation, protest culture, and social practices of listening. Prior to this, he taught at Sarah Lawrence College and at Columbia University, where he was appointed in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities. His research has been supported by Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Association for Asian Studies, and the Japan Foundation.
Novak has published research on the politics of sound in urban Japan, particularly in the impact of noise regulations on homeless and migrant labor communities in South Osaka, on the role of music, sound, and noise in the antinuclear movement in post-3.11 Japan, and the emergence of trans-Asian networks and cultural policies around experimental and improvised music. His current book project, Diggers: A Media Archaeology of Global Popular Music, theorizes musical globalization through contemporary histories of digital and analog sound media, particularly among networks of record and cassette collectors, informal sound archives, reissue labels and sound recording digitization projects in Southeast Asia.
Curriculum Vitae
Red Bull Music Academy (Japanese version)
New Books Network
Books and Ideas (French version in Volume! journal)