Shannon Garland received both her PhD and MA in Music from Columbia University (concentration: Ethnomusicology), and earned a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Appalachian State University (concentration: Music & Anthropology). She also held a Postdoctoral Teaching fellowship in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research investigates the production of popular music from an ethnographic, transnational perspective, focusing on indie music in South America, particularly urban Chile and Brazil. This work is concerned with types of labor emerging in the music industries, and ties these to affective musical response, social relations, and economic value. Her articles have been published in Culture, Theory and Critique; Ethnomusicology Forum; the Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros; and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. Book chapters have been published in the Oxford Handbook of Economic Ethnomusicology; Poderes do Som:Políticas Escutas e Identidades; and Enfoques Interdisciplinarios Sobre Músicas Populares En Latinoamérica: Retrospectivas, Perspectivas, Críticas y Propuestas. Actas Del X Congreso de La IASPM-AL. Dr. Garland’s monograph-in-preparation, For the Love: Indie Music, Labor and Value in Brazil and Beyond, narrates the rise and transformation of the Brazilian indie music industry from 1990 to 2020, exploring the tension between social and aesthetic values created through musical labor and exchange and the need for this labor to be valorized as economic value within the capitalist social order. She is also co-editing, with Pedro Roxo and Pedro Nunes, the volume Independence in 21st-Century Music Making: Cases from Beyond Anglo-America, contracted with Bloomsbury Academic. An additional article, “Music, Phones and Bank Loans: The Unproductive Labor of Branded Spotify Playlists and the Limits of ‘Affective Labor’”, is forthcoming (2024) in the Journal of Extreme of Anthropology, for the special issue “Affective Politics and the Policing of the Social Through Popular Music.” Before coming to Merced, Dr. Garland taught at UCLA, Columbia University, Fordham University, Marymount Manhattan College, and the Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY). Dr. Garland also worked for over a decade in the ESL industry, in Seoul, Santiago, and New York City, and she enjoys incorporating ESL techniques in the classroom. She is a longtime capoeira practitioner and has performed on bassoon, bass guitar, baritone (euphonium), and hichiriki (gagaku).
