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Staff Profile

Dr Oskar Cox Jensen

NUAcT Fellow: Arts and Humanities

Background

I joined Newcastle in October 2022 after holding research fellowships in Politics (UEA, 2020–22), History (QMUL, 2017–20), and Music (King’s College London, 2013–17). Though I took three degrees in History (Christ Church, Oxford 2006–13) and have flirted with English Literature, I’m making my home in Music for a new project on mainstream song and the invention of pop music, from 1520 to the present day. I’m interested both in how song has evolved and endured over the centuries, and in what its study can reveal about our shared cultural, social, and political history.

 

My interests have always centred on a mix of song, street culture, and politics, reflected in my first trade book, Vagabonds, which was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize; books on ballad-singing and Napoleonic song; collaborations on the Georgian polymath Charles Dibdin and the politics of music in Britain; and the website for Our Subversive Voice, a major project on protest song. I seem to be increasingly prone to singing in public and when giving papers. I’m a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Higher Education Academy, because collegiality and good teaching are important. I’m also a novelist and AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker, because there’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more. I am represented by Joanna Swainson.


My personal website is oskarcoxjensen.com



Research

My research generally relates to one or both of a) song, and b) street culture, while my empirical focus tends to be on British history – though always within a global context.

These are currently united in my NUAcT project, The Invention of Pop Music: Mainstream Song, Class, and Culture, 1520–2020. I'm interested in what song can tell us about cultural and social history in the longue durée, as well as in the long and slow evolution of song as a dominant, ubiquitous cultural form. I think it's a brilliant and often uncomfortable story, and that, since the invention of cheap print, we have under-rated the centrality of song to western culture generally.

The earliest key strand of my research is probably song in relation to the intersection of culture and politics, national identity, radicalism and loyalism. This is manifest most obviously in: my first book, Napoleon and British Song; a special issue of Journal of British Studies I co-edited with David Kennerley on Music and Politics in Britain; and the project Our Subversive Voice, based at UEA, examining five centuries of English protest song.

The second key theme is street culture, especially that of London. See my second monograph The Ballad-Singer and my first trade book, Vagabonds, which seeks to use human interest and bottom-up biography as a methodology.

Theatrical culture is also central to my research. See, for example, the volume Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture, co-edited with David Kennerley and Ian Newman.

I'm an active member of a number of research networks, such as Newcastle's own Performance Research Network, the Nineteenth-Century Song Club, and the Romantic National Song Network.

Performance and public engagement are key aspects of my research, both in practice-as-research and as outputs. I'm trying to never write or talk about a song without first having at least tried to sing it (or convinced someone else to!)

Teaching

I am not teaching any modules in 2022–23.

Publications