Since 2020, the Popular Music Books in Process series has held online events for music writers and scholars to showcase recent books or works in progress to an engaged audience. The series is a collaboration between the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Pop Conference, and IASPM-US. There have been more than 120 Zoom events so far, almost all preserved on YouTube. We run roughly biweekly through the fall and winter-spring seasons. Other session discussants will be added to the bill in the weeks to come.
Co-organizers: Elena Razlogova, Gustavus Stadler, Alyxandra Vesey, Eric Weisbard, and Carl Wilson for Journal of Popular Music Studies, IASPM-US, and the Pop Conference
Email Eric Weisbard at Eric.Weisbard@gmail.com to be added to the weekly email list with Zoom links and bonus content
Events this school year begin on Tuesdays at 5:30 pm ET.
September 10: Deborah Paredez, American Diva: Extraordinary, Unruly, Fabulous (Norton), with Ann Powers and Francesca Royster
September 24: Glenn McDonald, You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music (Canbury Press), with Carl Wilson
October 8: Franz Nicolay, Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music (University of Texas Press), with Steven Hyden
October 15: Tricia Romano on the Village Voice music section in The Freaks Came Out to Write (PublicAffairs), with Michaelangelo Matos
October 29 : Alison Fensterstock, ed, How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History (HarperOne), with Ann Powers and other contributors
November 19: Brian Kane, Hearing Double: Jazz, Ontology, Auditory Culture (Oxford University Press), with Daphne Brooks
December 3: Stephen Deusner, Garth Brooks in… The Life of Chris Gaines and Steacy Easton, Dolly Parton’s White Limozeen (both Bloomsbury 33 1/3)
December 17: Ashawnta Jackson, Soul-Folk (Bloomsbury 33 1/3 Genre series)
January 7: S.H. Fernando Jr., The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap's Masked Iconoclast (Astra House Books)
January 21: Jabari M. Evans, Hip-Hop Civics: Connected Learning in the Rap Classroom (University of Michigan Press)
February 4: Crystal S Anderson, The Music Eclectic: A Genealogy of K-pop (book in progress) with Tamar Herman
February 18: Masi Asare, Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters: Black Women, Voice, and the Musical Stage (Duke University Press) and Lucy Caplan, Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera (Harvard University Press)
March 4: Cisco Bradley, I Hear Freedom: Solidarity, the Great Migration, and Black Creative Music (book in progress), with Gabriel Vanlandingham-Dunn
March 18: Brian Fauteux, Music in Orbit: Satellite Radio in the Streaming Space Age (University of California Press, in progress) and Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture (University of California Press)
April 1: Michael Barthel, Party in the U.S.A., Maya Smith, Ne me quitte pas (both Duke University Press Singles series) and Jason Schneider, That Gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of ‘Hey Joe’ and Popular Music’s History Of Violence (Anvil Press), with Eric Weisbard
April 15: Jessica Holmes, The Musical Vernacular of Depression and Dan DiPiero, Big Feelings: Queer-Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl (both University of Michigan Press, in progress), with Robin James
April 22: Amy Skjerseth, Sound Machines: Pop Music’s Visible Past (University of California Press, in progress), with Catherine Provenzano
May 13: Benjamin Tausig, Bangkok after Dark: Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies (Duke University Press), with Elliott Powell and Kanjana Thepboriruk
May 27: Peter Crighton, The Vinyl Diaries: Sex, Deep Cuts and My Soundtrack to Queer Joy (Penguin Random House Canada)