About
Jarek Paul Ervin is a scholar working at the intersection of musicology, cultural studies, philosophy, and social theory. Broadly, Ervin’s thought investigates the overlapping and often conflicting dynamics of music as aesthetic practice, social force, historical inheritance, and a privileged window into the domain of sensory experience. Specific avenues for this inquiry include: popular music studies, twentieth century music, and American music; philosophy of music, especially historical materialism, German idealism, and critical theory (Lukács, Bloch, Benjamin, and Adorno); and gender and sexuality in music.
Ervin is currently a PhD candidate in University of Virginia’s McIntire Department of Music. His dissertation focuses on New York punk during the 1970s. Drawing on a range of archival and recorded materials, the project explores the way the category punk served as a fragile placeholder for a diverse and polemical musical practice during its early years. Ultimately, this leads to an interrogation of broader issues related to genre theory, philosophy of music, and popular music’s troubled internal history.
Ervin’s published work appears with or is forthcoming in Popular Music, Popular Music & Society, and Jacobin. He has also presented at a number of recent conferences including 2014’s Left Forum and IASPM-US 2016. Ervin has held fellowships from the Library of Congress and UVa’s Vice President's Office for Research, and was a 2015 Gladys Krieble Delmas Visiting Scholar at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Library and Archives. In 2016, his work will be supported by a Battestin Fellowship from the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia.
For more about his research and teaching, click here.