Geoff Baker is a Reader in the music department at Royal Holloway, University of London. He joined the department as a Lecturer in 2005, having previously served there as a Leverhulme Research Fellow. He studied modern languages at Oxford University and early music performance at the Utrecht Conservatorium and the Royal Academy of Music, and completed his PhD at Royal Holloway under the supervision of Tess Knighton.
Geoff specialises in music in Latin America. His book Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Duke University Press, 2008) won the American Musicological Society's Robert Stevenson Award in 2010. Together with Tess Knighton he edited Music and Urban Society in Colonial Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and he has contributed essays on music in colonial Peru to several journals and collected volumes. He also works on Latin American popular music, and has a particular interest in contemporary urban music, above all in Cuba and Argentina. He has published several essays on rap and reggaetón in Havana, and his book Buena Vista in the Club: Rap, Reggaetón, and Revolution in Havana (Duke University Press, 2011) was published in the series Refiguring American Music.
Since 2009 he has been focusing on childhood musical learning and music education in Cuba and Venezuela, participating as co-investigator in the three-year AHRC-funded project "Growing into Music." A series of documentaries and short films from the project has been launched online (http://growingintomusic.co.uk). He also held a British Academy Research Development Award in 2010-11 and undertook fieldwork in Venezuela on the country's orchestral music education program, El Sistema, on which he is writing a book. During 2011-12 he did fieldwork in Argentina and Colombia, working on his part of "Music, Digitization, Mediation: Towards Interdisciplinary Music Studies."
For more information on all these projects, visit http://geoffbakermusic.wordpress.com.
