David Suisman specializes in cultural history, the history of music, sound studies, and the history of capitalism. His scholarly interests also include media studies, the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of film and photography, intellectual property, and critical theory. 

Prof. Suisman received his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where his dissertation won the Bancroft Dissertation Prize. His first book, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard UP, 2009), was named one of Choice’s “Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009” and received the Hagley Prize for the Best Book in Business History, the DeSantis Book Prize of the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and several other honors. He is also co-editor, with Susan Strasser, of Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 

Prof. Suisman has been a Mellon Regional Faculty Fellow of the Penn Humanities Forum; a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley; an affiliate writer at the Headlands Center for the Arts; and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Since 2011, Prof. Suisman has also served as associate editor and book review editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies.