Georgina E. M. Born - Biography#

Georgina Born studied music at the Royal College of Music and was for several years in the late 1970's and '80s a prominent member of the modern music and avant-garde rock, jazz and improvised music scenes in London. She moved over to the study of anthropology in the '80s (BSc in 1982 at University College London, PhD 1989). Academic posts at Brunel University and Goldsmith's College followed. In 1997 she gained a lectureship in Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University where she taught the sociology and anthropology of culture, media and music, moving up through the academic hierarchy to a Professorship in Sociology, Anthropology and Music in 2006. She was a member of Cambridge's Screen Media Group, which in 2006 launched the first cross-schools Masters degree, Screen Media and Cultures.

In the late 1990s, Born carried out the first ethnography of the BBC and subsequently wrote on public service broadcasting both anthropologically and normatively, collaborating with Prof. T. Prosser to give perspectives on law and regulation. In the early 2000s she researched the advent and impact of digitisation in public service broadcasting. From 2005 Born turned again to music and began a major series of research projects in the anthropology and sociology of music.

In 2010 Born was awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council for a major research programme, 'Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies' (MusDig). Subsequently she moved to become Professor of Music and Anthropology at the University of Oxford. In 2014 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 2007 she was awarded the Royal Musical Association's Dent Medal.

In 2015 she was the Radcliffe-Brown Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the British Academy, and for three years from 2013 to 2015 she was the Schulich Distinguished Visiting Professorship and Dean’s Chair in Music at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Canada. In 2014 she was Bloch Distinguished Visiting Professor in Music in the Department of Music, University of California-Berkeley, where she gave the Bloch Lectures. She is currently a Professorial Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford, and has previously held Fellowships at Girton College, Cambridge (Professorial Fellow 2008-10), at Emmanuel College, Cambridge (Fellow and Director of Studies in SPS, 1998-2006), and at King's College, Cambridge (Senior Research Fellow, 1997-98). She has been visiting professor at Aarhus and Stockholm, and is currently Honorary Professor of Anthropology at University College London and a Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. She is also a Fellow of the Australian Cultural Sociology Association and of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism.