Naomi Waltham-Smith

Biography

Naomi Waltham-Smith is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford and Douglas Algar Tutorial Fellow at Merton College, having previously worked at the University of Warwick and the University of Pennsylvania. An interdisciplinary scholar interested in the politics of listening, she works at the intersection of sound studies with continental philosophy, decolonial theory, and Black radical thought. She is the author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford UP, 2017), Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham UP, 2021), Mapping (Post)colonial Paris by Ear (Cambridge UP, 2023), and Free Listening (Nebraska UP, 2024). She has been awarded research funding from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust and fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude and the Price Lab for Digital Humanities. This year she is a fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg writing a book on “Crises of Disenchantment: Listening, Democracy, and the Clamours of Nationalism.”