Professor Sarah Hill FLSW

I joined St Peter’s, virtually, in Trinity Term 2021. A native of Oakland, California, I studied music as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and then as a postgraduate at the University of Chicago. While working at the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library at Harvard University I was also able to fulfill an inexplicable lifelong ambition to learn the Welsh language.

A desire to combine my interest in Welsh with my background in musicology brought me to Cardiff University, where I earned a doctorate for my study of Welsh-language popular music and cultural identity. Since then, I have held lectureships at the University of Southampton and Cardiff University. From 2016-20, I was Chair of the UK/Ireland branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and I have been Co-ordinating Editor of the journal Popular Music since 2012. I was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in 2023.

Teaching

At St Peter’s, I teach undergraduate courses in popular music and pop-adjacent topics. In the Faculty, I lecture on Women in Popular Music, rock cultures of the 1970s, and music and race in the 1960s.

Research

My research is primarily concerned with the historiography of 20th-century popular music. My most recent monograph was a cultural history of the psychedelic counterculture in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s. I also recently edited a collection of essays about one-hit wonders, One-Hit Wonders: An Oblique History of Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

I am currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Progressive Rock, and researching women rock critics and the curation of taste in women’s magazines c. 1969-77.