Ross Cole

I am a Fellow of Homerton College Cambridge and an Affiliated Lecturer at the Faculty of Music.

I have a wide range of interests that extend from the late 19th century up to the present day, with a particular focus on popular and experimental traditions. Informed by ecological thinking, I use music to understand defining aspects of our contemporary world—from the poetics of nostalgia and racial belonging to fascist ideology, democracy, digital culture, and self-expression. My book The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination is out now with University of California Press.

I completed my PhD at King’s College Cambridge in 2015, funded by the AHRC. Before this, I studied at York (MRes) and Christ Church Oxford (BA), where I received the Gibbs Prize. Prior to taking up a Junior Research Fellowship in January 2017, I spent a year lecturing at Cambridge and received the Faculty of Music’s Teaching Prize.