
Dr. David Suisman
Associate Professor, History
Coordinator, Hagley Program in Capitalism, Technology, and Culture
University of Delaware
118 John Munroe Hall
Newark, DE 19716
302-831-2386
Biography
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.
Publications
Books:
- Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard University Press, 2010).
Edited Volumes
- Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction With Susan Strasser (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
Articles and Book Chapters
- “The Political Economy of Copying,” Reviews in American History (review essay, forthcoming).
- "Afterword: Music, Sound, History,” Journal of Social History, special issue on the social and cultural history of music (2018), 383-89.
- "The American Environmental Movement’s Lost Victory: The Fight Against Sonic Booms,” The Public Historian 37, no. 4 (November 2015), 111–31.
- “The Oklahoma City Sonic Boom Experiment and the Politics of Supersonic Aviation,” Radical History Review no. 121 (Jan. 2015), 169-195.
- “Sound Recordings and Popular Music Histories: The Remix,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 23, no. 2 (2011), 212-20.
- “Sound, Knowledge, and the ‘Immanence of Human Failure’: Rethinking Musical Mechanization through the Phonograph, the Player-Piano, and the Piano,” Social Text 102 (Spring 2010).
- “Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture: Black Swan Records and the Political Economy of African-American Music.” Journal of American History 90 (March 2004)
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