Gabriel Ellis is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in Musicology from Stanford University in 2023.
Gabriel’s research interests include popular music, digital media, Marxist aesthetics, critical theory, and the study of “feelings” of all sorts. His current research project, “Anaesthetics: Popular Music and the Flight from Feeling,” explores narratives of numbness, coldness, and dissociation in contemporary popular song. This project argues that today’s pop and hip-hop artists are developing refined aesthetic strategies for musically evoking states of nonfeeling, paradoxically translating sensory deprivation into the sensuous medium of sound. It historicizes popular music’s “flight from feeling” by relating this to contemporary trends in drug culture, music production, the media environment, and labor under postindustrial capitalism. And it theorizes the aesthetic contradictions that emerge when themes of nonfeeling are taken up by popular song, often understood as an art form preoccupied with describing, evoking, and producing emotion.
Gabriel’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and American Musicological Society.