Aaron A. Fox

AARON'S PERSONAL FAQs: please read Aaron's personal Frequently Asked Questions page BEFORE you send an initial email inquiry.  Many common questions are answered there.
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Aaron Fox, the current Chair of the Department of Music, came to Columbia in 1997. He taught from 1994-1997 at the University of Washington, Seattle in the Departments of Anthropology and Music. He holds the PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin (1995), and the AB in Music from Harvard College. 

Aaron's work has broadly focused on language/music relationships, working-class and popular culture, music and social identity, issues of place and subjectivity, ethnographic methodology, and  semiotics and poetics, with secondary interests in biological and cognitive scientific perspectives drawn from linguistics.

More recently, he has focused on issues of cultural and intellectual property and the repatriation of Native American cultural resources, as part of a broader interest in cultural survival and sustainability and music-centered community activism (which he calls "Ecomusicology"). He is currently working with Earth Institute postdoctoral fellow Dr. Chie Sakakibara on a "community partnered repatriation" of traditional music recordings made by Laura Boulton in 1946, with the Iñupiat community of Alaska's North Slope.  This project is supported by the National Science Foundation's Arctic Social Sciences Program. He is involved in other repatriation projects in development with the Navajo and Hopi tribes. 

Aaron is a country and rock guitarist (and former radio DJ), whose favorite artists are Stevie Ray Vaughan, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, Aerosmith, Willie Nelson, and Merle Haggard.  In addition to his focus on American vernacular musics (especially country, blues, r&b, and Tejano genres), he also teaches on South Asian and Arabic art musics, Aboriginal and indigenous musics, and song as a universal, cross-cultural phenomenon.  His former students teach at Connecticut College, Ewha University (Korea), The University of California, Santa Barbara, The College of Richmond, Tulane University, The University of Oklahoma, American University of Cairo, and Stony Brook University, and have held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale, Kenyon, and Columbia. Their research has been supported by fellowships and grants from NSF, ACLS, SSRC, Fulbright, IREX, Tinker Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Ford Foundation, FLAS, and other major granting agencies.

At Columbia, Aaron teaches courses entitled "The Social Science of Music," "Music and Language," "Music and Property," "Country Music," "Social Theory and the Arts," "Field Methods," and occasionally, "Asian Music Humanities (South and West Asia)." He also teaches the graduate proseminars in ethnomusicology, and the graduate field methods courses.

Aaron has served as a past Councilor for the Society for Ethnomusicology, and as a Board member for the American Ethnological Society. He has been Chair of the Department since 2008. From 2003-2008, he was Director of the Center for Ethnomusicology.

In the last year, Aaron has been a featured speaker at The Workshop on American Indian Linguistics (UCSB), The GAMMA-UT Conference on Music and Memory (Texas/Austin), The Center for Working Class Cultural Studies at Youngstown University, the International Conference on Radio and Aural Documents (Bogota, Colombia), Digital Humanities in the Global Age (Hong Kong City University),  Digital Economies and the Politics of Circulation (Columbia University), and elsewhere (see attached CV for more).

Aaron's book, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture, was published by Duke University Press in 2004.

Here are some resources to learn about Aaron's work:

• Read Aaron's Personal FAQ page before sending an initial email inquiry.
• Download Aaron's CV (short-form, PDF, correct June 2009)
• Read a recent article about Aaron and Chie's Alaska work on the Polar Field Notes Blog.
• Listen to an interview with Aaron about the Alaska repatriation project on Alaska Public Radio. (2008, mp3)
• Listen to Sherry Linkon interview Aaron on WYSU-FM (Youngstown, Ohio) about Real Country. (2008, mp3)
• Listen to Aaron sing "I Don't Fall to Pieces (Anymore)" (2007, Durham, North Carolina, mp3)
• Explore Real Country on Google Books.

Buy Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture from Amazon.com

"Real Country is one of the most rewarding and insightful books yet written about country music." -- Jon Weisberger, Country Standard Time

" . . . a creative, sophisticated, and beautifully written contribution to contemporary scholarship." -- Geoff Mann, Labour/Le Travail

". . . a theoretically sophisticated and beautifully written
ethnography, giving readers a lyrical depiction of working class Texan
barroom life, while developing a theory of the speaking and singing
voice as central to working class culture." -- Wendi Haugh, Anthropological Quarterly

"Fox's work brings an important and much-needed sense of a truly materialist ideology to the study of language. It is, as well, perhaps the finest ethnographic work on music and class to have been published in the past 20 years." -- David Samuels, Language in Society

"Fox has written an extraordinary, evocative, and respectful study that offers scholars in anthropology, linguistics, musicology, and sociology access to a culture that is all too often dismissed, sentimentalized, or ignored . . ." -- Joli Jensen, Journal of Anthropological Research