Ken McLeod
Professor: Musicology, Popular Music
B.Mus. (U.B.C.), M.A. (McMaster), Ph.D. (McGill)
EmailBook
We Are the Champions: The Politics of Sports and Popular Music (Ashgate: 2011).
Select Book Chapters and Articles
“Hip Hop Holograms: Tupac Shakur, Time Travel and Technological Immortality,” chapter in Afrofuturism 2.0 (Lexington, forthcoming 2015).
“Afro-Samurai: Techno-Orientalism in Recent Hip Hop,” Popular Music (Cambridge University Press) vol. 32, no.2 (Fall 2013), 261 – 277.
“Visual Kei: Hybridity and Gender in Japanese Popular Culture” Young: Nordic Journal of Youth Research vol. 21, no.4 (Fall 2013), 309-325.
“Ideology and Racial Myth in Henry Purcell’s King Arthur and Thomas Arne’s "Alfred” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 vol. 34, Nos. 1-2 Spring-Fall 2010, 82-102.
“Constructions of African American Masculinity in Music and Sports” American Music vol. 27, No. 2 Summer 2009, 204-226.
“Sounds of the Future: Music and Science Fiction” chapter in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction eds. M. Bold, A. Butler, A. Roberts and S. Vint (New York: Routledge, 2009), 392-403.
“A Fifth of Beethoven: Disco, Classical Music and the Politics of Inclusion” American Music, vol. 24, No.3 Fall 2006, 348-363.
“Venus: Politics and Masculine Anxiety on the Restoration Stage,” Seventeenth Century Music, (University of Illinois Press) 2006 vol. 11, no.1 online journal accessible: http://www.sscm-jscm.org/jscm
“Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Rock Music” Popular Music (Cambridge University Press), vol. 23, no. 2, (Fall 2003), 315-333.
“Bohemian Rhapsodies: Operatic Influence and Crossover in Rock Music” Popular Music (Cambridge University Press), vol. 20, no.2, (Fall 2001), 189-203.
Working on What
Driving Identity: Popular Music, Machines and Automotive Culture. A monograph on the intersection of the influence and development of machine and automotive sounds, manufacturing process, advertising, audio system technologies and popular music and their combined role in constructing and reflecting racial, gender, social and locational identities.
Ghosts in the Machine: Vocaloids, Hologragms, Posthumanism and Augmented Realities in Popular Music. A monograph critically analyzing issues (including techno-spirituality, immortality, hauntology, Afrofuturism, Techno-orientalism and changing notions of virtual ‘live’ performance) surrounding technological/machine mediations of music and sound in popular music.
Health, Aging and Popular Music. A project researching the relationship of popular music to disability, mental and physical health and the role of popular music in reflecting and constructing notions of aging in contemporary society.
Will be Where
Presenting papers at various national and international conferences and symposia
Biographical Note
Ken McLeod is a Professor of Music History and Culture at the University of Toronto. His research and publishing activities address identity politics and the intersections between science fiction, techno culture, Afrofuturism, sport and popular music. He has also published on popular music appropriations of art music and gendered and racial narratives of national identity in 17th- and 18th-century English theatre music, including representations of Amazons and warrior queens in the music of Handel and Purcell. Recent publications include articles in Popular Music, Seventeenth Century Music, American Music, College Music Symposium, Restoration, and Popular Music and Society as well as numerous entries in The Grove Dictionary of American Music and the Sage Encyclopedia of Ethnomusicology. His book We Are The Champions: The Politics of Popular Music and Sports (Ashgate, 2011) examines the role of sports and popular music in constructing racial, gender, ethnic, socio-economic and national identities. He is also researching issues surrounding technology and identity politics in hip hop and Japanese popular music, the influence of automotive culture and machine sounds on popular music and issues surrounding aging and health in popular music culture. He regularly delivers papers at national and international conferences and has received numerous grants, fellowships and awards from The Handel Society, The Japan Foundation, Popular Music and Society, The Jackman Humanities Institute, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). His work is currently supported by a five-year SSHRC Insight Grant.