Anton Blackburn, Musicology

Anton Blackburn is a Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnomusicology with a Certificate in Feminist Studies. Their dissertation, Incongruous Sound: Trans Music, Nightlife, and Listening in Contemporary London, develops a philosophical ethnography of trans night/life in East London, asking how trans women sustain political and social life through musical and sonic encounters with alienation and suspension. Their fieldwork traces “aural incongruence“ — attending in particular to the voice in transition — as it coheres within constellations of recorded popular music, dance, and listening in postcolonial Britain. Incongruous sounds of (non-)passing make audible the relationship between trans embodiment and harmonic ideologies of the social and the self, where the latter’s entanglement with what María Lugones calls the modern colonial gender system produces a negational “reality reinforcement“ of the former. 

Anton is the 2025 recipient of the Society for Ethnomusicology's 21st Century Fellowship. Their peer-reviewed writing appears in The Journal of the Royal Musical Association and Contemporary Music Review. They serve as an Associate Editor for Rising Voices in Ethnomusicology and have presented at the American Anthropological Association, the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, and the Duke-Leuphana Gender, Queer, and Transgender Studies Workshop. 

Before Duke, Anton completed an M.St. in Musicology at Oxford University under the supervision of Georgina Born, and holds a B.A. in Music (summa cum laude) also from Oxford. 

Contact Info:

Office Location:
Email Address:

Teaching (Fall 2026):

• MUSIC 161.01, INTRO TO MUSIC THEORY Synopsis

  Biddle 102, MW 06:15 PM-07:30 PM

Keywords:

Listening • Music and technology • Nightlife • Popular music • Sound recordings • Transgender Studies

Recent Publications

1. Blackburn, AL, Transaurality: On Listening to SOPHIE Against Queer Theory, Contemporary Music Review, vol. 44 no. 3 (July, 2025), pp. 254-282, Informa UK Limited [doi]
2. Zheng, A; Kaniuka, E; Brown, JR; Groesbeck, G; Blackburn, A, What's Queer about Ethnomusicology Now?, Rising Voices in Ethnomusicology, vol. 21 no. 1 (2025), pp. 1-26
3. BLACKBURN, AL, Dragging Music: Towards a Queer Socio-Cultural Semiotics, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 149 no. 1 (May, 2024), pp. 1-21, Cambridge University Press (CUP) [doi]  [abs]
4. Blackburn, A, Voices That Matter: Authenticity, Identity, and Voice in the Musical Career of Lana Del Rey, Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology, vol. 13 no. 1 (June, 2020), pp. 84-114, University of Western Ontario, Western Libraries [doi]  [abs]