Bio
Naomi Waltham-Smith is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and Douglas Algar Tutorial Fellow at Merton College.
Prior to joining Oxford in September 2023, she was Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies and Deputy Chair of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Warwick, where she was also Chair of Academic Freedom Review Committee. Before that she taught Music and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania (2012–2018), having held postdoctoral fellowships at City University and Indiana University, and supervised at the University of Cambridge. She is a graduate of Selwyn College, Cambridge and King’s College London.
Specializing in the politics of listening, she is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of philosophy (especially recent French, Black radical, and decolonial thought) with music and sound studies. She is interested in how aurality is imbricated in some of the most significant and urgent political issues under contemporary capitalism, including the crises of democracy we are witnessing today, together with antiracist and environmental struggles. She has also worked on the politics of listening in contexts as varied as the Austro-German musical canon and Las Vegas casinos. Beyond academic publication, she works collaboratively in the public sphere to develop these ideas through listening workshops and citizens’ assemblies, multimedia installations in galleries and public spaces, long-term community collaborations, and policy engagement.
Waltham-Smith is the author of four books, and co-editor of a volume of the new Bloomsbury Cultural History of Western Music. Her first monograph, Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford UP, 2017) addresses, from musical-analytical and philosophical perspectives, how listening promotes ideals and experiences of community. Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham UP, 2021), completed during a fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude, interweaves readings of deconstructionist thinkers with analyses of sound art and activism to examine aurality’s implication in the governance of life. In the wake of a resurgence of antiracist organizing on both sides of the Atlantic, her third monograph, Mapping (Post)colonial Paris by Ear (Cambridge UP, 2023), draws on a decade of fieldwork in the banlieue, supported by funding from the Mellon Foundation; the project reinvents the bourgeois figure of the flâneur as a feminist-decolonial field recordist and configures listening as an expressly spatial practice of mapping the traces of France’s coloniality. Her interest in listening extends to the university as a site of democratic deliberation. Her fourth monograph, which is forthcoming in November 2024 in Nebraska University Press’s Provocations series and is entitled Free Listening, connects with her contributions to the policy-facing and cross-sector work on academic freedom and deliberative democracy.
She is currently working on a monograph, supported by funding from the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy and a fellowship at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, that excavates a hidden concept of listening in the history of political philosophy in the hope of illuminating the challenges facing our democracies today. Future plans include a sequel to Shattering Biopolitics focused on “ec(h)otechnics” that will explore the technological modulation of listening and posthuman modes of aural attunement to the environment.