Professor Timothy J. Cooley’s latest book, Cultural Sustainabilities: Music, Media, Language, Advocacy, was released in April 2019 by University of Illinois Press. The book⁠—which was edited by Cooley and contains a foreword by Jeff Todd Titon, Professor Emeritus at Brown University⁠—is “a daring interdisciplinary journey into the nexus of the humanities and ecological science.”

 

The work focuses on the connection between environmental sustainability and human cultural sustainability, and examines the potential for reversal of negative human impact on the environment from a cultural perspective, particularly at the local level. Cooley curated a collection of twenty-three essays by musicologists and ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, folklorists, ethnographers, documentary filmmakers, musicians, artists, and activists that each explore the topic by asking a particular question or presenting a local case study. Contributors include Cooley, Tom Rankin, Nancy Guy, Jeffrey A. Summit, Margarita Mazo, and Jeff Todd Titon, among others.

 

Publication was supported by a grant from the UC Santa Barbara Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.

 

Cultural Sustainabilities: Music, Media, Language, Advocacy is available for purchase at press.uillinois.edu. The book is also available through the UC Santa Barbara Library.

 

Timothy J. Cooley is a professor of music and global studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Surfing about Music and Making Music in the Polish Tatras: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Mountain Musicians, and a coeditor of Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, second edition. Learn more about Professor Cooley here.