Biography:
A scholar working in the fields of ethnomusicology, folklore studies, popular music studies, and performance studies, Harris M. Berger is professor of music in the Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University. Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience (Wesleyan University Press, 1999) was his first book, and his articles have appeared in a range of journals which includes Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, the Journal of American Folklore, and the Journal of Folklore Research. He and Michael T. Carroll co-edited Global Pop, Local Language (University Press of Mississippi, 2003), a volume on the politics and aesthetics of language choice and dialect in popular musics around the world. He and Giovanna P. Del Negro are the authors of Identity and Everyday Life: Essays in the Study of Folklore, Music, and Popular Culture (Wesleyan University Press, 2004), a collection of original essays in social and cultural theory. His most recent work includes Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) and Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World (Jeremy Wallach, Berger, and Paul D. Greene, eds., Duke University Press, 2011). “History of Rock Music,” “Music in World Cultures,” “Performance in World Cultures,” “Theories of Performance” and “Performing Vernacular Cultures” are courses he often teaches.
In 2010, Berger and Del Negro completed a five-year term as the editors of the Journal of American Folklore, and Berger and Annie J. Randall are the editors of Wesleyan University Press’s Music/Culture book series. He has served as president of the US Branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and founded the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology, which he chaired from 1996 to 2004. Member-at-large on the Steering Committee of TAMU’s Faculty and Staff Committed to an Inclusive Campus, Berger is actively involved with diversity issues at TAMU.
He currently serves as the president of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
