Professor Anna Morcom has won £299,904 in funding from the Leverhulme Trust for a four-year Project Grant entitled ‘Music, money and power: An economic anthropology of music’. A postdoctoral research assistant and a PhD student will work with Professor Morcom on the project.

The project will develop a new subfield, ‘economic ethnomusicology’. Drawing principally from economic anthropology and economic history, it will tackle foundational questions concerning the economics of music. Barely explored, these include theories of exchange and value and questions of money/resources, surplus and waste. The focus will be on the sociality of live or recorded music in/as exchange and ways that money operates at micro and macro levels, shaping or limiting musical activity, social hierarchies and relationships. Global and comparative in scope and incorporating diverse ethnographic and historical study, the project will thus seek to transform the economic study of music.

Job/studentship advertisements will be released in due course.