Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith

Academic Subject(s): Music

Background

I am an interdisciplinary scholar, working at the intersection of music theory, recent European philosophy, and sound studies. I am interested in the politics of listening across multiple contexts from the centre of Austro-German musical canon and liberal democracy to antiracist and environmental struggles and even casinos. Beyond academic publication, I work collaboratively in the public sphere to develop these ideas through listening workshops and citizens’ assemblies, multimedia installations in galleries and public spaces, and long-term community collaborations.

I came to Oxford in September 2023 from the University of Warwick where I was Reader, then Professor, in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies and Deputy Chair (Education) of the Faculty of Social Sciences. Before that, I was Assistant Professor in Music and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, having held postdoctoral fellowships at Indiana University and City University.

Teaching

At Oxford, I teach papers in music theory and analysis; philosophy and critical theory of music and sound; and music, technology, and politics in the long nineteenth century. I am keen to hear from prospective DPhil applicants interested in philosophical approaches to music analysis and sound studies, the politics of aurality, decolonial aesthetics, the environmental humanities, and interdisciplinary studies of listening.

I have a strong belief in the liberatory potential of education. The granddaughter of an Irish miner, I was the first in my family to go to university, or even to study for A-levels. I was the beneficiary of a scholarship-funded private secondary education and a bursary at the Royal College of Music Junior Department. I found an intellectual home as an undergraduate at Selwyn College, Cambridge largely thanks to the College’s commitment to welcoming students from diverse backgrounds and a hugely supportive Director of Studies. I am deeply committed to fighting for more equal and equitable access to higher education and for opportunities for everyone to fulfil their intellectual curiosity, especially in the interdisciplinary humanities.

Research

I am the author of four books, and co-editor of a volume of the new Bloomsbury Cultural History of Western Music. My first monograph, Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford UP, 2017) addresses, from musical-analytical and philosophical perspectives, how listening promotes ideals and experiences of community. Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham UP, 2021), completed during a fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude, interweaves readings of deconstructionist thinkers with analyses of sound art and activism to examine aurality’s implication in the governance of life. In the wake of a resurgence of antiracist organizing on both sides of the Atlantic, my third monograph, Mapping (Post)colonial Paris by Ear (Cambridge UP, 2023), draws on a decade of fieldwork in the banlieue, supported by funding from the Mellon Foundation; the project reinvents the bourgeois figure of the flâneur as a feminist-decolonial field recordist and configures listening as an expressly spatial practice of mapping the traces of France’s coloniality. My fourth monograph published in Nebraska University Press’s Provocations series, Free Listening (2024) reframes seemingly intractable debates and polarized positions on free speech, freedom of critical inquiry, systemic injustice, and political dissent by shifting attention from our voices to our ears.

I am currently working on a book, supported by funding from the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy and a fellowship at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, that excavates a hidden concept of listening in the history of political philosophy in the hope of illuminating the challenges facing our democracies today. I am also undertaking a project, supported by an AHRC Locally Unlocking Culture through Inclusive Access grant, with JUSTICE, youth charity United Borders, and other researchers, in partnership with the CPS and Clifford Chance, to explore the use of rap music as evidence in the criminal justice system and its impacts on young people’s music-making. My interests in listening extend to the university as a site of democratic deliberation: in addition to a chapter of Free Listening and philosophical articles, I have co-authored articles with a practising lawyer on academic freedom and regularly contribute to the higher education sector’s work in this area.

Publications

For an up-to-date list of publications please see https://www.auralflaneur.com/writing.