Dr Geoff Baker, Royal Holloway, University of London
Geoff Baker is a Reader in the music department at Royal Holloway, University of London. He joined the department as a Lecturer in 2005, having previously served there as a Leverhulme Research Fellow. He studied modern languages at Oxford University and early music performance at the Utrecht Conservatorium and the Royal Academy of Music. Having gained experience as a performer of Renaissance and Baroque music, he went on to complete a PhD at Royal Holloway under the supervision of Dr Tess Knighton.
He specialises in music in Latin America, and he has published extensively on colonial Peru. His book Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Duke University Press, 2008) won the American Musicological Society’s Robert Stevenson Award in 2010, and a Spanish translation is due to be published in Peru. He co-edited Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2010) with Tess Knighton, and he has contributed essays to several journals and collected volumes. Geoff also works on Latin American popular music, and he has a particular interest in contemporary urban music, above all in Cuba. He has published several essays on rap and reggaetón in Havana, and his book Buena Vista in the Club: Rap, Reggaetón, and Revolution in Havana (Duke University Press, 2011) was published in the series Refiguring American Music. Recently, he has been focusing on childhood musical learning and music education in Cuba and Venezuela. He was co-investigator on the three-year project “Growing into music,” funded through the AHRC’s Beyond Text scheme. He also held a British Academy Research Development Award in 2010-11 and undertook fieldwork in Venezuela on the country’s famous orchestral music education program, El Sistema. He is in the later stages of writing a book on the topic. He spent a number of months in 2011-12 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, working on his part of a broader project entitled “Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies.” This is a research programme, based at the Faculty of Music at Oxford University and led by Professor Georgina Born, which is examining the changes to music and musical practices afforded by digitization and digital media. He is focusing on digital cumbia and folklore in Buenos Aires. He is based at Oxford University in 2012-13.