About the Author

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 cultural politics and global circulations of musical media. His interests include materiality of popular music, sound technologies, protest culture, and social practices of listening. Prior to USCB, 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, Social Science Research Council, National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mellon Foundation, Association for Asian Studies, and the Japan Foundation. 

His current project, Diggers: A Global Counterhistory of Popular Music, expands theories of musical globalization through contemporary histories of digital and analog sound media collection, particularly among networks of record and cassette collectors, informal sound archives, reissue labels and sound recording digitization projects in Southeast Asia.

Curriculum Vitae