Education
- Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 2003
Phil Ford is associate professor of music in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
Ford previously taught at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a fellow of the University of Texas Humanities Institute, and at Stanford University, where he was a fellow of the Stanford Humanities Fellows Program.
His published work has focused on postwar American popular music (especially jazz and film music), American cold war culture, radical and countercultural intellectual history, and sound and performance.
Ford is the author of Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013), a cultural and intellectual history of hipness in American life from the 1940s through the 1960s. His essays have appeared in Representations, Journal of Musicology, Jazz Perspectives, Musical Quarterly, and other scholarly journals. He is also the co-author (with Jonathan Bellman) of the musicology blog Dial ‘M’ for Musicology, which he founded in 2006 and maintains to this day.
His current interests revolve around music and philosophy and, more particularly, on magical and occult styles of thought; at present, he is working on a book on this topic.