Directory

Faculty Research

• 20th-century America
• Popular music
• Consumer culture
• Popular culture

Authored Books

Edited Books

•  Pop When the World Falls Apart: Music in the Shadow of Doubt. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
• Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
• This is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at Experience Music Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Book Chapters

• “Format, the Literature of American Popular Music, and Mr. Crump.” In Music Radio: Building Communities, Mediating Genres, Morten Michelsen and Mads Krogh, eds. Forthcoming from Bloomsbury, late 2018.
• “Country Radio: The Dialectic of Format and Genre,” in The Oxford Handbook Of Country Music, ed. Travis Stimeling (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
• “Love, Lore, Celebrity, and Dead Babies: Dolly Parton’s ‘Down From Dover.’” The Rose and the Briar: Love and Liberty in the American Ballad, edited by Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus, 287-304. New York: Norton, 2004.

Articles

• “Old Books for New Ceremonies: CliffsNotes to the Literature of American Popular Music,” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 30:1-2 (July, 2018).
• “Musical Beauty and Top 40 Democracy: A Moderated Conversation,” with Barry Shank, Diane Pecknold, Journal of Popular Music Studies 29:1 (March 2017).
• “Rock and Roll,” entry for The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, August, 2016.
• “How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Mainstream? Charting the Musical Middle,” American Quarterly, 67:1 (March 2015), 253-265.
• “Why Do We Keep Having the Same Debates About Pop Songs,” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 24, 2014.
• “Beyond Category? Never! The Game of Genres in Popular Music,” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 25:3 (September 2013), 401-405