Georgina Born
Listening after Whitehead: Nonhuman Sound, Fragility, and Care

Georgina Born FBA OBE is Professor of Music and Anthropology at Oxford University. Earlier in her life she worked as a musician with Henry Cow, the Feminist Improvising Group, Derek Bailey’s Company, Mike Westbrook’s Orckestra and other groups, and was a member of the London Musicians’ Collective. Recently, she has advised both the activist group Gender Relations in New Music and the ‘Defragmentation’ initiative involving jointly the music festivals at Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, Ultima (Oslo) and MaerzMusik (Berlin). Her work combines ethnographic and theoretical writings on music, sound, television and digital/media, with a particular focus on music’s social, institutional and material dimensions. Her books include Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (1995), Western Music and Its Others (2000), Music, Sound and Space (2013), and Improvisation and Social Aesthetics (2017). From 2010-2015 she directed the ERC-funded research program ‘Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies’, one of the main publications of which will soon be published: Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology. She has held visiting professorships at UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, McGill, Oslo and Aarhus Universities. Born chairs the Culture, Media and Performance Section of the British Academy.