I am a writer and scholar specializing in cultural history, with particular interest in the history of music, sound studies, war and society, and the history of capitalism. My scholarly interests also include media studies, the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of film and photography, intellectual property, and critical theory.

I received my B.A. from Yale University and my Ph.D. from Columbia University, where my dissertation won the Bancroft Dissertation Prize. My first book, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard UP, 2009), was named one of Choice’s “Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009” and received the Hagley Prize for the Best Book in Business History, the DeSantis Book Prize of the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and several other honors. I am also co-editor, with Susan Strasser, of Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

My next book, Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers  will be published in 2024 by the University of Chicago Press.

I have been a Mellon Regional Faculty Fellow of the Penn Humanities Forum; a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley; an affiliate writer at the Headlands Center for the Arts; and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. From 2010 to 2021, I was associate editor and book review editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies.

I co-edited (with Susan Strasser) Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), described by a reviewer for the Journal of American History as “multicultural historical analysis at its best.” A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, I have published articles in the Journal of American History, Radical History Review, The Believer, Social Text, Journal of Social History, and other publications.

I am also co-editor of Capitalism and the Senses (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

I live in Philadelphia.