Anna Morcom works on music and dance in India and Tibet from diverse perspectives that seek to understand the contemporary world and processes of change in and through musical culture. Her research is ethnographically-based and interdisciplinary and encompasses traditional as well as popular musics. Her publications include Unity and discord: Music and politics in contemporary Tibet (2004, Tibet Information Network); Hindi film songs and the cinema (2007, Ashgate); Illicit worlds of Indian dance: Cultures of exclusion (2013, Hurst and OUP); and articles in a range of peer-reviewed journals – Ethnomusicology, Popular Music, Yearbook for Traditional Music, Ethnomusicology Forum, Consumption, Markets and Culture, South Asian Film and Media, Cultural and Social History, and HIMALAYA. She made a VCD album of Tibetan songs with the singer Tanzin Gyatso in Tibet in 2006, entitled sPrin Gyi Metok (‘Cloud flowers).

In 2014, Illicit worlds of Indian dance was awarded the Society of Ethnomusicology’s Allan Merriam prize and the Marcia Herndon prize of SEM’s Gender and Sexualities section. Her research has been supported by a number of grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy. She is the founder of SEM’s Special Interest Group on Economic Ethnomusicology. Morcom has been interviewed on Illicit worlds of Indian dance by various UK media including BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed, and by India-based media including the national newspaper, The Hindu, the leading social justice magazine, Tehelka, and the independent news, information and entertainment organisation Scroll.

Politics, nationalism, identity, gender, inequality, economic development, capitalism, economic ethnomusicology, media, film

Ph.D. School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) 2002; B.A. Ethnomusicology and Hindi, SOAS, 1993-1996