Georgina Born named Schulich Distinguished Visiting Chair for 2013-2015

The Schulich School of Music welcomes Georgina Born, Professor of Music and Anthropology at Oxford University and Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College, to McGill and Montreal. Professor Born will hold the Schulich Distinguished Visiting Chair in Music from 2013 to 2015.

Professor Born’s work encompasses ethnographic and theoretical writings on music, media and cultural production. Her work often focuses on major cultural institutions including television production at the BBC, computer music at IRCAM in Paris (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), and interdisciplinary programs at the University of California, Irvine.

At Schulich this fall she will be leading a graduate seminar called ‘The Socio-Cultural Study of Music’, a course designed to introduce students to new and innovative approaches from anthropology, sociology and media studies to the study of contemporary musics. This interdisciplinary course will help students learn new ways to place music in a wide socio-cultural context.

Professor Born is a member of the European Research Council's Social Sciences and Humanities expert panels. She has also been an Honorary Professor of Anthropology at University College London, a Fellow of Yale University's Center for Cultural Sociology, an International Fellow of the Australian Sociological Association, and a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge and of Emmanuel College Cambridge. In 2008 she was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association for her contributions to music research. In conjunction with her appointment at McGill University, in 2014 Professor Born will hold the Bloch Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley.

From 2010 to 2015 Professor Born is directing the research program ‘Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies’, funded by the European Research Council’s Advanced Investigator Grants scheme. This research program is the first to examine comparatively the transformation of music and musical practices by digitization through ethnographies in seven countries in the developing and developed worlds.