Dr Alexander Cowan

Alexander Cowan is a musicologist specialising in the intellectual and political history of music in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

Academic interests

Alexander Cowan’s academic interests include: 

• Music and race
• Music, science, and technology
• The Blues
• Musical modernism(s)
• Opera and music theater (focusing on 20th century).

Degrees obtained

• BA, Oxon.
• MMus, Lond.
• PhD, Harvard.

Awards and prizes

• American Musicological Society AMS-50 Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2022-3.
• Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Dissertation Fellowship, 2022-3.
• American Musicological Society Paul A. Pisk Prize for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper, 2018.

Biography

Alexander’s current research is focused on the history of the idea of musical talent, and its imbrication in British and American eugenics movements. Building on his PhD completed at Harvard in 2023, his first book project, Unsound: A Cultural History of Music and Eugenics, explores how eugenicists used the idea of innate, heritable musical ability as a model for eugenic research, and considers the legacies of eugenic thinking in music psychology and education. He is also developing a project on the political legacy of the Blues in the second half of the 20th century.

Other interests

Cooking, walking, collecting obscure musical instruments.