Rate My Professor Alexander Cannon

Alexander Cannon is Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at the University of Birmingham. He earned an undergraduate degree in flute performance and mathematical economics from Pomona College in California and a PhD from the University of Michigan. Before joining Birmingham, he taught at Western Michigan University. Currently, he serves as Principal Investigator of the ERC-selected and UKRI-funded SoundDecisions project (2025–2029), investigating music, environmental change, and economic decision-making among farmer-musicians in Vietnam's Mekong Delta through archival, fieldwork, and quantitative methods. He previously directed the AHRC IAA project Sounding by Heritage: Sino-Vietnamese Musical Collaboration in the UK (2023). Cannon's research focuses on Vietnamese music, traditional music of Asia and its diasporas, music and climate change, creativity theory, musical sustainability, intangible cultural heritage, and queer ethnography, particularly the genre đờn ca tài tử and notions of creativity drawing from Daoist theories.

His key publications include the monograph Seeding the Tradition: Musical Creativity in Southern Vietnam (Wesleyan University Press, 2022), which received the 2023 Royal Musical Association/Cambridge University Press Outstanding Monograph Book Prize. Other significant works are Awakening the Soul with the Left Hand: Narration and Healing in Vietnam’s Diasporic Traditional Music (Ethnomusicology, 2021), Outing the Methodological No-No: Translating Queer Space to Field Space (in Queering the Field, Oxford University Press, 2019), Tradition, Still Remains: Sustainability through Ruin in Vietnamese Music for Diversion (Ethnomusicology Forum, 2016), and From Nameless to Nomenclature: Creating Music Genre in Southern Vietnam (Asian Music, 2016). Cannon has held prominent roles such as Co-Editor and Chair of the Editorial Board of Ethnomusicology Forum (2020–2023), Book Reviews Editor for the Yearbook for Traditional Music, Secretary of the Society for Asian Music Board, and Member of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology Executive Committee. His scholarship supports UN Sustainable Development Goals including decent work, reduced inequalities, climate action, and peace. He supervises PhD students in his research areas.