Phil Ford

Phil Ford is an associate professor of musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and affiliate faculty in IU’s Cognitive Science Program. His musicological work has dealt especially with postwar American culture and music, as well as sound, performance, philosophy, and the intellectual history of counterculture. The main product of this research has been the monograph Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013), as well as essays that have appeared in Representations, Journal of Musicology, Musical Quarterly, Jazz Perspectives, and elsewhere.

Alongside his peer-reviewed scholarship, he has worked in various media of public scholarship since the 1990s. He founded and wrote for the blog Dial ‘M’ for Musicology, a collaboration with Jonathan Bellman that ran from 2006 to 2018. Since 2018, he has co-hosted the arts and philosophy podcast Weird Studies with writer/philosopher J. F. Martel. Weird Studies considers magical, contemplative, and otherwise supernormal styles of thought, feeling, and experience in various contexts, and Ford has pursued these subjects in recent essays for Journal of Musicological Research, North American Review, Daedalus, and several edited collections, as well as in the forthcoming book, co-authored with Martel, titled Weirding (Strange Attractor).