Alexander W. Cowan is a musicologist specializing in the intellectual and political history of music in the twentieth century, focused on the intersections of music, race, and capitalism.
His book project, Unsound: A Cultural History of Music and Eugenics, reveals how ideas about music and musicality have been weaponized in British and US-American eugenics movements from the 1860s to the mid-twentieth century, and how ideas from this period survive both in modern science and the rhetoric of the contemporary far right. Drawing on original archival research, and interdisciplinary studies of science, race, ability, reproduction, and labor, the book charts how music’s entanglements with eugenics shaped notions of race and whiteness during an historical period in which these categories were in constant flux.
A concern with music’s capacity to take on political meaning is a through-line in his work, from past projects on left-wing folksong revival, and essays published and in progress on the racial politics of the phonograph. His next major project expands the scope of this concern, using unlikely appropriations of the Blues from across the twentieth century—from the left internationalism of Benjamin Britten and W. H. Auden, to the amateur blues guitar performances of Reagan strategist Lee Atwater—to explore how musical genre functions as a terrain of political contest.
Alexander holds a PhD in Music from Harvard University, where he was a Graduate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, an MMus in Musicology from King’s College, London, and a BA in Music from the University of Oxford. He is currently a Research Fellow in the Arts at Jesus College, Cambridge.