David Suisman
Resources and Links
Biography
David Suisman specializes in cultural history, war & society, the history of music, sound studies, and the history of capitalism. His scholarly interests also include media studies, the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of film and photography, intellectual property, and critical theory.
Prof. Suisman received his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where his dissertation won the Bancroft Dissertation Prize. His latest book, Instrument of War: Music and Making of America's Soldiers, will be published in November 2024 by the University of Chicago Press. His first book, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard University Press, 2009), was named one of Choice’s “Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009” and received the Hagley Prize for the Best Book in Business History, the DeSantis Book Prize of the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and several other honors. He is also co-editor of Capitalism and the Senses (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) and Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
Prof. Suisman has been a Mellon Regional Faculty Fellow of the Penn Humanities Forum; a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley; an affiliate writer at the Headlands Center for the Arts; and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. From 2010 to 2021, Prof. Suisman was associate editor and book review editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies.
Publications
Books:
Instrument of War: Music and Making of America's Soldiers (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard University Press, 2009).
Edited Volumes
Capitalism and the Senses, with Regina Lee Blaszczyk (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).
Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction With Susan Strasser (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
Articles and Book Chapters
“Introduction: New Approaches to Music and Sound,” with Rebecca McKenna, special issue, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 22, no. 4 (December 2023), 367-83. (Special issue co-editor.)
“Sky’s the Limit: Capitalism, the Senses, and the Failure of Supersonic Aviation in the United States,” in Capitalism and the Senses, ed. Regina Lee Blaszczyk and David Suisman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 111-27.
“Introduction,” with Regina Blaszczyk, in Capitalism and the Senses, ed. Regina Lee Blaszczyk and David Suisman (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 1-18.
“Between Rapture and Anguish: The Goals of a Book Review Section,” in Marian Kimber et al., “Reviewing the Book Review: A Roundtable,” Journal of Musicological Research 40, no. 2 (March 2021), 1–7.
“How Military Music Works.” In Sonologia 2019: Proceedings of the International Conference on Sound Studies, edited by Fernando Iazetta et al., (Sao Paolo: ECA-USP, 2020), 54–72.
“The Political Economy of Copying,” Reviews in American History 48, no. 1 (2020)
"Afterword: Music, Sound, History,” Journal of Social History, Special issue on the social and cultural history of music, 52, no. 2 (2018), 383-89.
"The American Environmental Movement’s Lost Victory: The Fight Against Sonic Booms,” The Public Historian 37, no. 4 (November 2015), 111–31.
“The Oklahoma City Sonic Boom Experiment and the Politics of Supersonic Aviation,” Radical History Review no. 121 (Jan. 2015), 169-195.
“Sound Recordings and Popular Music Histories: The Remix,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 23, no. 2 (2011), 212-20.
“Sound, Knowledge, and the ‘Immanence of Human Failure’: Rethinking Musical Mechanization through the Phonograph, the Player-Piano, and the Piano,” Social Text 102 (Spring 2010).
“Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture: Black Swan Records and the Political Economy of African-American Music.” Journal of American History 90 (March 2004)
