Darren Mueller

Darren Mueller received his PhD from Duke University in 2015 after completing an MA in Jazz History and Research at Rutgers, The State University in Newark and a BM in saxophone performance from the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research interrogates how technologies of sound alter the development of musical styles and the means by which music making enables cultural agency. These interests animate his research on the history of the jazz album, the political aurality of black music in the United States, as well as his collaborative work in the digital humanities exploring new forms of multimodal scholarship.

His current book project examines the jazz industry’s adoption of the long-playing record (LP) in the 1950s. The project details how musicians and other jazz industry professionals leveraged the rapid rise of mass consumption in the postwar era to improve jazz’s cultural positioning within the Unites States. Articles on this topic have appeared in Jazz Perspectives and The Journal for Society of American Music. Additionally, he has presented at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, Society for American Music, International Association of the Study of Popular Music (US branch), and the American Anthropology Association. His research, teaching, and collaborative work has been supported by numerous sources, including a Berger­-Carter Fellowship from the Institute of Jazz Studies.

With additional research interests in sound and digital media, he is a co-editor of Provoke! Digital Sound Studies, a collection of online projects that experiment and critically engage with sonic media. A companion print volume of collected essays on this topic is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Together, the combined print and web publications argue for the mutually beneficial relationship between traditional and digital scholarship.