Erin T. Allen
Contact Information
- allen.1545@osu.edu
Areas of Expertise
- Ethnomusicology
- Global Brass and Street Band Cultures
- Music and Politics/Social Movements
- American Studies
- Sound Studies
Education
- PhD, Musicology/Ethnomusicology, The Ohio State University
- Post-baccalaureate certificate, Anthropology, Northwestern University
- BM, Music Performance, University of Notre Dame
- BM, Film, University of Notre Dame
Erin T. Allen is an ethnomusicologist whose scholarship broadly concerns emergent and mobile brass band cultures as well as the use of music, sound, and critical listening as tools of community engagement and social and political change. Her research focuses on the transnational HONK! Street Band Movement and its family of festivals – participatory, grassroots, and non-commercial festivals featuring activist or community-based brass and percussion ensembles, which take place in nearly two dozen cities across the globe. She examines how socio-cultural, political, and educational practices undergirded by participatory listening and empathetic sounding are informed by, musically manifest in, and critically transform public realms characterized by diversity, inequality, and shifting forms of identity and belonging.
Erin has presented her work at the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Studies Association, and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, among others. She is a co-editor of the anthology HONK!: A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism (2020 Routledge Press) and is currently working on transforming her dissertation, which focuses on the HONK! Movement as it has taken shape in the United States, into a book. Erin is a trumpet player whose creative practice centers on participatory and community-engaged performance. She has enjoyed performing with numerous brass street bands, both in the HONK! Movement across the U.S. and locally in Columbus, Ohio.
Select Publications
“HONK! United: A Virtual Global Festival of Activist Brass Bands During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” with Andrew Snyder and Reebee Garofalo. Music & Politics: 16(1), 2022.
HONK!: A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism, (eds.) Reebee Garofalo, Erin T. Allen, and Andrew Snyder. New York, NY: Routledge, 2020.
“Sounding Solidarity at the Suffolk County ICE Immigration Detention Center.” In HONK!: A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism, (eds.) Reebee Garofalo, Erin T. Allen, and Andrew Snyder. New York: Routledge, 2020