An Update

2017 brings some big life changes for me, so I thought I’d update everyone on what’s happening and how that’s affecting my work.

My partner will be starting a teaching gig at a prep school in Connecticut this fall. This means I’m moving to Connecticut, too. I’ll still be teaching at UNC Charlotte this coming academic year, but I am actively searching for a job anywhere between NYC and Boston–a job where my partner and I can see each other regularly during the school year.

I’m still working on my Sonic Episteme manuscript–I’ll have that in to Duke this fall as well. (Protip: don’t move to a new state and finish a book manuscript in the same summer.) I’m starting some new research on the concept of the future in pop music. The first bit of that work tracks how in the postpunk era, “the future” meant something like a modernist avant-garde, whereas in the early 21st century, the era of indie entrepreneurialism and streaming, “the future” means something more like financialized speculation. There are parallel shifts in Afrodiasporic approaches to “the future” — e.g., Sharpe’s theory of “wake” is to financialized speculation as Eshun or Sun Ra’s “futurepast” is to modernist avant-gardeism. I’m also continuing some work on post-feminism, contract, and private property. I’ll teach a feminist theory grad seminar on that in the spring.

This fall I’ll be at SPEP in Memphis, the New England Popular Culture Association meeting in Amherst, and then I’ll be speaking in the UK before and after I’m in Bern for the Future Sounds of Pop Music conference.

My spring schedule is very open at this point and I’d love to start filling it up with speaking gigs.