Steve Waksman
Associate Professor of Music and American Studies
 |
Send E–mail |  |
Office: Sage Hall 105 |  |
Phone: (413) 585–3161 |
Steve Waksman is associate professor of music and American studies, having joined the Smith faculty in the fall of 2001. His research and teaching interests are in the history of U.S. popular culture—especially music, but also film, television and literature—during the 19th and 20th centuries, and in the intersection of race, gender and sexuality. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota.
Waksman is the author of two books: Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard University Press, 1999) and This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California, 2009). An essay drawn from the latter, "Grand Funk Live! Staging Rock in the Age of the Arena," is included in the collection, Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music, published by Duke University Press.
Waksman's essays on the guitar have appeared in the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World and The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar, among other publications, and in November 2008 he was the keynote speaker at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's American Music Masters conference honoring the legacy of Les Paul. In 1998, his dissertation on the electric guitar won the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize awarded by the American Studies Association.
Currently, Waksman is researching a new project on the history of live music in the U.S. from the 19th century to the present.
