Rate My Professor Steve Waksman

Steve Waksman is the Leverhulme International Professor of Popular Music at the University of Huddersfield, within the Department of Media, Humanities and the Arts, School of Arts and Humanities, and a member of the Centre for Research in Music and its Technologies. He leads the Amplification Project, a five-year research initiative funded by a £5 million Leverhulme Trust grant that supports six postdoctoral researchers and twelve PhD studentships. The project examines the history, technological development, cultural significance, and social impacts of amplification technologies, including amplifiers, microphones, loudspeakers, and their interactions with musical instruments, live music venues, performance styles, audiences, and the live music economy. Previously, Waksman taught at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, for over 20 years as the Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music and Professor of American Studies. He has also performed as a guitarist in the band The Electric Eyes.

Waksman's research specializations include the history of musical instruments, particularly the electric guitar; intersections of music and technology such as amplification; genre studies in heavy metal, punk, jazz, blues, country, rock, pop, and hip-hop; live music studies encompassing venues, audiences, performance styles, economies, and technical infrastructures; sound studies; popular music historiography; and analyses of race, gender, sexuality, and identity in popular music from the 19th to 21st centuries. His key publications comprise Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard University Press, 1999), This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press, 2009), Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé (Oxford University Press, 2022), Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A., sixth edition co-authored with Reebee Garofalo (Pearson, 2014), the co-edited SAGE Handbook of Popular Music with Andy Bennett (Sage, 2015), and The Cambridge Companion to the Electric Guitar co-edited with Jan-Peter Herbst (Cambridge University Press, 2024). These books have received the Woody Guthrie Prize from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music U.S. Chapter and the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society; his dissertation won the 1998 Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize from the American Studies Association. Waksman delivered the keynote address at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 2008 American Music Masters event honoring Les Paul and appeared as the “Doctor of Rock” on WRSI radio. His scholarship has an h-index of 15 and 1,997 citations.