I am a writer and scholar specializing in cultural history, with particular interest in music, sound studies, war and society, and the history of capitalism. My scholarly interests also include media studies, the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of film and photography, intellectual property, and critical theory. Since 2004, I have taught in the history department at the University of Delaware, where I am an associate professor.

I received my B.A. from Yale University and my Ph.D. from Columbia University, where my dissertation won the Bancroft Dissertation Prize. My first book, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard UP, 2009), was named one of Choice’s “Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009” and received the Hagley Prize for the Best Book in Business History, the DeSantis Book Prize of the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and several other honors. I am also co-editor of Capitalism and the Senses (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) and Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

My next book, Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers will be published in 2024 by the University of Chicago Press.

I have been a Mellon Regional Faculty Fellow of the Penn Humanities Forum; a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley; an affiliate writer at the Headlands Center for the Arts; and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. From 2010 to 2021, I was associate editor and book review editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies.

I live in Philadelphia.