Dr Sarah Hill FLSW

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 fulfil 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 to 2020, 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

In the Faculty of Music, I teach Critical Listening (Prelims), Women in Popular Music (FHS), and Art Decade: Rock Musics of the 1970s (FHS). For the MSt I have taught Music and Race in the 1960s and The Social and Cultural Study of Music (MSt), as well as supervising extended essay topics (Prelims), Dissertations (FHS), Analysis Projects (FHS), and postgraduate theses. At St Peter’s I teach tutorials for Foundations in the Study of Music, Music and the Sounds of Protest, Women in Popular Music, and Musical Thought and Scholarship.

Research

My research is primarily concerned with the historiography of 20th-century popular music. My most recent monograph is 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).