Sergio Ospina-Romero (Ph.D. Musicology '19) has accepted a tenure-track position at Indiana University as well as a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Department of Music of Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He will spend two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Universidad de los Andes, where he will work on transforming his dissertation into a book and will teach graduate courses on sound production, media, and jazz history for the department’s M.A. program in musicology. Ospina-Romero will join Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music as Assistant Professor of musicology in 2021.
At Cornell, Ospina-Romero received the Ellen Gussman Adelson Prize for his work with Palonegro, a Latin-jazz ensemble founded and directed by him; the Don M. Randel Teaching Fellowship to design and teach an undergraduate class about global jazz; and the Donald J. Grout Memorial Prize, in recognition of his exceptional dissertation.
Based on thorough research in an archive that has remained largely neglected by historians and musicologists, that of the Victor Talking Machine Company, Ospina-Romero’s dissertation studies the agency of the company’s scouts, the engagement of local talent, and the establishment of new networks and markets throughout Latin America during the acoustic era of the recording industry. Ospina-Romero’s main argument, that the globalization of vernacular musics occurred earlier than often assumed in current scholarship and that it did in close connection to larger political processes of Neo-Colonialism, expansionism, and U.S. empire-building at the turn of the twentieth century has the potential to completely re-shape these conversations.
