Faculty Profiles

Mark Burford is R.P. Wollenberg Professor of Music at Reed and chair of the American Studies program. His research and teaching focus on twentieth-century popular music in the United States, with particular focus on African American music after World War II, and late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austro-German concert music. His scholarship has appeared several journals and other edited collections, including the article “Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist—A Reinvention in Three Songs,” which received the Society for American Music’s 2012 Irving Lowens Award for the outstanding article on American music.  He is the author of Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field (Oxford University Press, 2019) and editor of The Mahalia Jackson Reader. He arrived at Reed in 2007.