Andrea Bohlman

An associate professor of music at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Andrea Bohlman studies the political stakes of music making and sound in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Much of Bohlman’s work builds on her expertise on music in East Central Europe, cultures of protest, and everyday histories of sound recording. Her 2020 monograph, Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland, grows out of a decade of research on work of sound and music for the opposition to state socialism in Poland. She is currently writing a book that engages the history of tape recording to ask questions about sound, listening and the idea—and practice—of consent. The book, provisionally entitled Magnetic Fields: Tape and the Sounding of Consent, connects spools of tape made for academic research, grassroots archives, and soundscape composition—encompassing tape recording during and for war, tape recording to make social and political change, and tape recording at home.