Phil Ford

Phil Ford

Phil Ford (Ph.D. University of Minnesota, 2003) is an associate professor of musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He has also taught at Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin. His work has dealt especially with postwar American culture and music (jazz, pop, film music, the avant-garde), as well as sound, musical performance, philosophies of experience, and the intellectual history of counterculture. He is the author of Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013) and has published essays in RepresentationsJournal of MusicologyMusical Quarterly, and elsewhere. He was the founder and lead writer for the blog Dial ‘M’ for Musicology, which ran from 2006 to 2018, and nowadays co-hosts an arts and philosophy podcast, Weird Studies, with philosopher J. F. Martel. His current work concerns magical and contemplative styles of thought, feeling, and experience in various contexts, musical and otherwise.

WS102: On Walking

Foot Travel as a Magical & Aesthetic Practice

with J. F. Martel and Phil Ford

WS101: On Walking invites participants to explore walking as metaphor, spiritual practice, and embodied inquiry. As the course is drawn from years’ worth of Weird Studies episodes (at least all the way back to 2019’s “Green Mountains Are Always Walking”), it’s a journey Weird Studies listeners won’t want to miss.

This course concluded in August 2025 and is now self-paced.

WS101: The Beauty and the Horror

An Education in Dreadful Wonder

with J. F. Martel and Phil Ford

In five joint lectures, Phil and JF cover Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, Wilde’s Salomé, Montaigne’s “On a Monster Child”, Lyotard’s “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?”, Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Strauss’s Salome, Oates’s “On Boxing”, Ballard’s Crash, Hickey’s “Formalism”, and Martel’s “Stay with Mystery: Hiroshima Mon Amour, Melancholia, and the Truth of Extinction.” The throughline is an education in dreadful wonder.

This course concluded in July 2024 and is now self-paced.