Alan Stanbridge

Alan Stanbridge is an Associate Professor for the Master of Museum Studies Program at the Faculty of Information and in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at UTSC. Professor Stanbridge has been a recipient of a Faculty Teaching Award for his contribution to undergraduate teaching.

Stanbridge has published numerous journal articles and book chapters in the fields of popular music, jazz history, museum studies, cultural policy, and cultural theory, and he has recently completed a new book entitled Rhythm Changes: Jazz, Culture, Discourse. He is a contributor to the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, writing the main entries on Jazz and Postmodernism, with the main entry on the Hollywood Musical forthcoming in a future volume. Stanbridge has presented papers at conferences in Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Spain, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Scotland, England, the United States, and Canada.

Stanbridge’s current interdisciplinary research project focuses on the manner in which a variety of discourses have shaped contemporary understandings of musical meaning and cultural value. These discourses have tended to become codified and naturalised, and have had a profound influence on the production, circulation, regulation, and reception of various forms of music. Drawing on a diverse range of musical examples from the early 20th Century to the present day, his research explores the shifting value judgements that have served to circumscribe cultural artefacts, tracing the historical origins and contemporary trajectories of these evaluative discourses.