Support Kritika | Support H-Net | Buy Books Here | Join the NBN and NBN en Español on Patreon | Visit New Books Network en Español!
- African Studies
- African American Studies
- American Politics
- American Studies
- American South
- American West
- Asian American Studies
- Australian and New Zealand Studies
- British Studies
- Canadian Studies
- Caribbean Studies
- Central Asian Studies
- Chinese Studies
- East Asian Studies
- Eastern European Studies
- European Politics
- French Studies
- German Studies
- Iberian Studies
- India Studies
- Indian Ocean World
- Indigenous Studies
- Iranian Studies
- Irish Studies
- Israel Studies
- Italian Studies
- Japanese Studies
- Korean Studies
- Latino Studies
- Latin American Studies
- Mexican Studies
- Middle Eastern Studies
- Pacific Studies
- Polish Studies
- Russian and Eurasian Studies
- Southeast Asian Studies
- South Asian Studies
- Taiwan Studies
- Turkish Studies
- Ukrainian Studies
- Western European Studies
- World Affairs
- Animal Studies
- Anthropology
- Archaeology
- Business, Management, and Marketing
- Media and Communications
- Critical Theory
- Disability Studies
- Drugs, Addiction and Recovery
- Education
- Economics
- Finance
- Geography
- Gender Studies
- Genocide Studies
- Higher Education
- Human Rights
- Journalism
- Language and Translation
- Law
- LGBTQ+ Studies
- National Security
- Philanthropy
- Philosophy
- Policing, Incarceration, and Reform
- Political Science
- Politics & Polemics
- Public Policy
- Sex, Sexuality, and Sex Work
- Sociology
- Sound Studies
- Sports
- Urban Studies
- Big Ideas
- Celebration Studies
- Co-Authored
- Cover Story
- Historical Materialism
- History Ex Silo
- Interpretive Political and Social Science
- Invested Investor
- Landscape Architecture
- Mormonism
- NBN Book of the Day
- NBN Seminar
- New Books with Miranda Melcher
- On the Cusp: Between Strategy and Ethics
- Postscript: Conversations on Politics and Political Science
- Practical History
- Preparing for Life After Grad School
- Psychology and Climate Change
- Syriac Studies
- The Chair: In The Room at the Fed
- Oceanic Studies
About Nathan Smith
Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University. His interests tend to fall into two camp: sound studies and mathematical/computational music theory. These two often meet via anthropology, science and technology studies, and continental philosophy. The genres of music he specializes in span across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: jazz, extreme metal, rock, avant-garde, Western art music, and electronic music. Most broadly, he is interested in the cultural histories of technology, sound, and media across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the reception history of the works of Deleuze/Guattari, Derrida, and Foucault in the humanities and beyond.Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu).
NBN Episodes hosted by Nathan:
January 5, 2026
Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness
How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brube…
October 26, 2025
On Painting
Charles J. Stivale (Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Wayne State University) and Dan Smith (Professor of Philosophy, Purdue University) join me to di…
October 21, 2025
Risible
Risible: Laughter without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound (University of California Press, 2024) explores the forgotten history of laughter, from…
October 12, 2025
At the Vanguard of Vinyl
In At the Vanguard of Vinyl, Darren Mueller examines how the advent of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948 revolutionized the recording and productio…
August 1, 2025
Format Friction
With the rise of the gramophone around 1900, the shellac disc traveled the world and eventually became the dominant sound format in the first half of …
July 10, 2025
Hating Jazz
Andrew S. Berish. 2025. Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse. (U of Chicago Press, 2025) Some good words fr…
February 21, 2025
Perversions of the Market
Perversions of the Market: Sadism, Masochism, and the Culture of Capitalism (SUNY Press, 2024) argues that capitalism fosters sadism and masochism--no…
January 29, 2025
Poor Things
For generations most of the canonical works that detail the lives of poor people have been created by rich or middle-class writers like Charles Dicken…
September 13, 2024
Paul Robeson's Voices
Paul Robeson's Voices (Oxford UP, 2023) is a meditation on Robeson's singing, a study of the artist's life in song. Music historian Grant Olwage exami…
June 5, 2024
Blacksound
Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (U California Press, 2024) explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the r…
April 15, 2024
Theorizing Music Evolution
What did historical evolutionists such as Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer have to say about music? What role did music play in their evolutionary t…
April 2, 2024
Sounds As They Are
In a recording, what sounds count as music? Sounds made by a musician's body--including inhales, finger taps, and grunts--have for decades been dismis…
February 18, 2024
Hearing Luxe Pop
Hearing Luxe Pop: Glorification, Glamour, and the Middlebrow in American Popular Music (U California Press, 2021) explores a deluxe-production aesthet…
November 14, 2023
The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning
What is meaning? How does it arise? Where is it found in the world? In recent years, philosophers and scientists have answered these questions in diff…
September 14, 2023
Dreams in Double Time
In Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop (Duke UP, 2023), Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new future…
August 31, 2023
Voice Machines
Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, the singers occupied a celebrit…
January 7, 2023
Switched On
The Moog synthesizer ‘bent the course of music forever’ Rolling Stone declared.Bob Moog, the man who did that bending, was a lovable geek with Einstei…
September 15, 2022
Earworm and Event
In Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreams, and Other Imaginary Refrains (Duke UP, 2022) Eldritch Priest questions the nature of the imagination in contem…