Large scale political and economic transformations, especially the rise of the nation state and the business corporation, focusing on the United States. Comparative-historical methods, both qualitative and quantitative. Sociology of time.
Current Research:
American folk music, social movements and race. How
do the boundaries between artistic genres (in this case musical genres) align
themselves with social boundaries (in this case race)? American folk is
especially interesting because it has never been defined by any particular
people--the folk--but always been identified as someone else's music, typically
by educational or social elites. Moreover, it has been a particular project of
social movements, both old left and new left, in their quest for racial
justice. While the music captured by the term "folk music" was more racially
integrated than the society at large, by the 1960s folk revival, it was strongly
identified as "white" music. The research examines the practices of commercial
music marketing, the strategies and activities of social movements, and the
cultural construction of the term "folk."