Associate Professor David Novak Awarded Prestigious ACLS Fellowship

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has awarded a prestigious fellowship to David Novak, associate professor of ethnomusicology and director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music at UC Santa Barbara.

With the fellowship's support, Novak will complete his manuscript "Diggers: An Archival Counterhistory of Popular Music." The project explores the collection, preservation, and digital redistribution of physical sound recordings — including records and cassettes — in emergent archives across the Global South and beyond.

Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with archivists, collectors, and filmmakers in Indonesia, Cambodia, Kurdistan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Novak examines how physical sound media can represent diasporic and decolonial auralities that challenge hegemonic narratives of musical production.

At the heart of the project is a global network of "diggers" — artists, activists, collectors, archivists, and scholars who recover recordings and other sonic artifacts and bring them into new cultural contexts. Their work engages with the histories of media collections, regional music industries, field recording, and the online mediation of sonic memory.

"To 'dig' a global history of recorded music means many things," Novak writes. "To foster new appreciations of marginalized sounds; to uncover buried historical knowledge; to reevaluate material artifacts and circulate them into new conditions of value in a deeply uneven transnational economy."

Through Diggers, Novak illuminates the cultural significance of physical sound media and the ways recorded music can preserve histories that might otherwise be overlooked. He plans to extend the project through a series of public-facing and multimedia publications developed in collaboration with scholars, artists, curators, and independent practitioners around the world.

Photo: David Novak, associate professor of ethnomusicology, examines a collection of cassette tapes in Istanbul. (Photo by Alexandra Lippman)

Read the original announcement from the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.

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