Jessica Allison Holmes

Short presentation

I am a music scholar with expertise in popular music studies, sound studies, disability studies, voice studies, feminist media studies, and critical public health studies. My scholarship analyzes the representation of disability in contemporary popular music, with emphasis on vocality, embodiment, and identity formation, an agenda that culminates in two distinct areas of expertise: (1) deaf ontologies of sound and voice, and (2) the gendered aesthetics of disability and mental health in contemporary pop music. My peer-reviewed articles on popular music and disability appear in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies. I currently serve as co-chair of the UCPH “Art & Health” interdisciplinary research cluster.

My forthcoming book, Music at the Margins of Sense (University of Michigan Press) challenges the prevailing misconceptions associated with deafness in western music through examining the creative endeavours of musicians from across the diverse audiological and socio-cultural spectrum of hearing loss. The book contests the biological and cultural certainties of “normal” hearing, while offering a multisensory, multimodal account of musicianship rooted in bodily autonomy, perceptual agency, and musical self-determination, expanding ontological definitions of music in the process.   

My second book, The Musical Vernacular of Depression (University of Michigan Press, under contract) examines the representation of depression in contemporary pop music relative to the increasing prevalence of clinical depression among young people and its related gendered and racial inequalities alongside a widespread cultural depathologization of depression. What I call “the musical vernacular of depression” is a coherent aesthetic category comprised of distinct semantic practices and stylistic conventions that I argue blur a biomedical definition of depression as a “common and serious mood disorder” with a generational sensibility that is unbounded by diagnosis and pathology.

The research for my second book is currently supported through the European Union’s 4EU+ University Alliance's Visiting Professorship funding scheme, for which I will undertake a residency at Sorbonne University’s Pierre Louis Institute of Epidemiology and Public Health in the Spring of 2025.

Prior to starting my appointment at the University of Copenhagen, I held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music (2017-2021), where I received the 2019 UCLA Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Research, the highest university-wide distinction for postdocs across the sciences and humanities. I hold a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from McGill University, where I was a Fellow of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship program (2012-2015) through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and was the 2017 recipient of the McGill Schulich School of Music’s Outstanding Teaching Award. 

I have an interdisciplinary teaching profile that spans undergraduate and graduate-level courses, from introductory survey courses on the History of American Rock & Pop and the History of Western Art Music, to issues and methods courses in Popular Music Studies and Historical Musicology, to special topics seminars in Sound Studies, Voice Studies, and Disability Studies. I have also supervised MA and BA theses on a range of topics related to popular music and identity.