Cody Black

Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow

Cody Black is an anthropologist of sound and music whose research examines how voice and listening become sites of labor, relation, and survival in contemporary South Korea. Working across media theory, science and technology studies (STS), feminist theory, and process philosophy, his work attends to how relational and affective sonic practices take shape amid compounding forms of precarity and social alienation, particularly under the exhausting demands of competitive self-optimization in the neoliberal present.

At Vanderbilt, he is completing his first book manuscript, tentatively "Analog Optimism: Digitalized Life and the Aural Labor of Becoming in South Korea." Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul, the project follows Korean young adults across sites where sound becomes entangled with aspiration, assessment, and care—including language classrooms, K-Pop training academies, and vinyl record bars—as they cultivate ways of hearing and being heard while navigating intensifying technoscientific regimes of audibility. Attending closely to moments where listening and voicing intersect with failure, loneliness, and experiences of death, the book approaches sound as a temporal and ethical practice through which attachment, potential, and unfinished futures are sustained, even as the horizon of the “good life” grows increasingly compressed.

His broader research encompasses the acoustic ecologies of suicide, the postcolonial circulation of City Pop, and the sonic dimensions of youth within South Korea’s demographic crisis. He is currently developing these projects through edited volume contributions, journal articles, and a second book manuscript, respectively. His work appears in the Journal of Musicological Research and has been recognized with writing awards from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Ethnomusicology, as well as fellowships and grants from the Academy of Korean Studies and Duke University, among others. He received his Ph.D. in Music (Ethnomusicology) from Duke University and currently serves as Outgoing Chair of the Sound Studies Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology.