Biography:
Jayson Beaster-Jones received his B.A. (1996) in Music and Anthropology at Whitman College and his M.A. (2000) and Ph.D. (2007) in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He has previously taught courses at the University of Chicago and Augustana College (SD).
His current research project, Music as Merchandise: Music Commodities, Markets, and Values in India, examines music retail stores as sites of cultural production in contemporary India, focusing in particular upon the kinds of economic and social values that are produced as music is sold, as well as the meanings that accompany music commodities in retail contexts. The project also addresses the cultural and media histories of the Indian music industry, the discourses of piracy and intellectual property, and the social changes that have accompanied India’s economic liberalization reforms.
Dr. Beaster-Jones has conducted several years of ethnographic research in North India and has been the recipient of grants from the Fulbright-Hays DDRA, the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago, the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, and the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. He has presented his research at a number of professional conferences and was the 2008 recipient of the Lise Waxer Prize of the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology for the paper entitled “Indexing the Past, Selling the Future.” He has recently published in the journals Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, and has forthcoming articles in the Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music and Sound Studies, Grove Dictionary of American Music (2nd edition). He is also preparing a manuscript for a book entitled Bollywood Sounds: Introduction to the Popular Musics of India that will be published by Oxford University Press.
Dr. Beaster-Jones teaches MUSC 200: Popular Musics of India, PERF 603: Power Performance and Identity, and PERF 621: Topics in Popular Music at Texas A&M University. In 2011, he was a recipient of the Student Recognition of Teaching Excellence awarded by the Texas A&M University System.
