Invited Talks
“‘Enhanced by Conscious Selection’: Eugenics, Scientific Management, and the Quest to Make a Better Musician,” Cambridge University Music Faculty Colloquium Series, November 15, 2023
Conference Presentations
“Historicizing ‘The Galton Ear’: Auditory Acuity and the Trace of Music in Early Eugenics,” What is Auditory History? International Musicological Society Auditory History Study Group, Paris, FR, February 2026
“Lee Atwater’s Bush Inaugural Blues,” IASPM-US, Washington, DC, February 2026
“Unsound: A Cultural History of Music and Eugenics,” Critical Perspectives on Comparative Musicology and Music Studies, 1885–1950, University of Chicago/University of Vienna Collaborative Workshop, Chicago, IL, November 2025
“Musicology Against Race Science; or, Some Limits of Some Critique,” American Musicological Society, Chicago, IL, November 15, 2024
“Musical Mendelism: How Francis Galton’s Eugenic Musical Rhetoric Shaped the 20th Century,” Royal Musicological Association, London, September 13, 2024
“Hearing ‘Hereditary Genius’: Musicality and the Rhetorical Foundations of Eugenics,” American Musicological Society, Online, November 12–22, 2021
“Musical Selection: Eugenics, Ethnomusicology, and the Right,” Society for Ethnomusicology, Online, October 28–31, 2021
“Was There a Eugenic Musical Aesthetic?” Conference of the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group, London, July 1–2, 2021 [Conference cancelled owing to COVID-19]
“Francis Galton’s Singing Eutopia: Musicality, Vitality, and Sexuality in The Eugenic College of Kantsaywhere (1909),” Modern Language Association, Toronto, CA [Online], January 7–10, 2021
“Eugenics at 78rpm: The Phonograph as Instrument of Racial Betterment,” Society for American Music, Minneapolis, MN, March 25–29, 2020 [Conference postponed owing to COVID-19]
“Spotify, Ancestry, and Race Science in the Twenty-First Century,” American Musicological Society, Boston, MA, October 31–November 3, 2019
“The Mismeasure of Music: Eugenics and the Science of Musical Ability,” Sonic Circulations 1900–1950: Musical Thought, Scientific Fantasies, Global Contexts, King’s College, London, June 24–5, 2019
“Eugenics at the Eastman School: Music Psychology and the Racialization of Musical Talent,” American Musicological Society, Rochester, NY, November 9–12, 2017
Alexander W. Cowan 