I was previously a lecturer at The New School and postdoc fellow at Princeton. I earned my PhD at the University of Cambridge (Peterhouse). Prior to grad school, I worked as a journalist and arts editor.

I teach courses on digital musicology, multimedia ethnography, and global pop music, as well as performance cultures of the Philippines.

I’m currently a faculty fellow at UT’s Humanities Institute Seminar on Digital Futures and Social Justice, where I’m principal investigator of the research initiative Sound Space Art Lab. I’m also an associate of Cambridge Digital Humanities.

My current monograph project Pop Convergence (under contract with Oxford University Press) examines musical flows and networks in contemporary Manila. Through a combination of archival research, musical analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores how mainstream entertainment industries bestow assurances of cultural and social authority on audiences. 

As former journalist and editor, I produced multimedia work for The National, Al Jazeera English, Wired, Philippine Daily Inquirer, and The Japan Times.

Academic Publications

~ Articulating Media: Genealogy, Interface, Situation, volume co-ed. with Nathaniel Zetter, for Technographies series of Open Humanities Press, 2023 >

~ Review of Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures (eds. Karen Redrobe & Jeff Scheible) for International Journal of Communication, 17, 2023 >

~ ‘Radyo Tanudan: Sonic Collectivities in a Philippine Village,’ chapter for Routledge Companion to Radio and Podcast Studies, eds. Mia Lindgren & Jason Loviglio, Routledge, 2022 >

~ ‘Stepping onto the Pop Dance Floor,’ American Music Perspectives, 1/2, 2021 >

~ ‘Rak en Rol: The Influence of Psychedelic Culture in Philippine Music,’ Rock Music Studies, special issue on Global Psychedelia and Counterculture, ed. Kevin Moist, 5/3, 2018 >

~ ‘The Sound and Spectacle of Philippine Presidential Elections, 1953-1998,’ Musical Quarterly, 100/3-4, 2018 >

~ ‘The Rapper Is Present: Sound Art, Liveness, and the Negotiation of Identity in Jay Z’s Picasso Baby,’ Journal of Popular Music Studies, 29/1, 2017 >

~ ‘The Ballad of Grandmaster PH: Contesting Narratives and Lost Archives in Philippine Hip-Hop,’ chapter for Hip-Hop Archives: The Politics and Poetics of Knowledge Production, eds. Mark V. Campbell & Murray Forman, Intellect Books, forthcoming

~ ‘Turn to Kitsch: Eat Bulaga! and the Arrangement of Musical Humor in Philippine Television,‘ chapter for Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies, ed. Ryan Bañagale, Oxford University Press, forthcoming

~ ‘Interludes of MTV,’ International Journal of Creative Media Research, forthcoming

james.gabrillo@austin.utexas.edu