Marina Peterson
Associate Professor — Ph.D., University of Chicago

Contact
- E-mail: marina.peterson@austin.utexas.edu
- Phone: (512) 471-0054
- Office: WCP 5.148
Interests
Sound, cities, sensory ethnography, materialities, infrastructure; US (Los Angeles, Appalachian Ohio)
Biography
My work traces modalities of matter, sensory attunements, and emergent socialities, exploring diverse and innovative ways of encountering and presenting the ethnographic. With research primarily in and of Los Angeles and small cities of Appalachian Ohio, I have taken up these concerns through investigation of entanglements of sound, sensation, and urban infrastructures below and above ground.
My most recent book, Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles traces environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter that cohere in and through noise pollution legislation and the politics of airport noise in the 1960s, addressing key ways in which noise amplifies ways of sensing and making sense of the atmospheric. Engaging with a burgeoning literature on forces, attunements, and forms of containment that bring the atmospheric into focus, I depart from its emphasis on air, examining, instead, crucial ways in which noise has been central to how we know how to feel and think atmospherically.
Courses
ANT 324L • Sensing: Elemental Media-Wb
32080 • Spring 2021
Meets MW 10:00AM-11:30AM
Internet; Synchronous
Wr
ANT 392M • Intro To Grad Social Anthro-Wb
31275 • Fall 2020
Meets T 9:30AM-12:30PM
Internet; Synchronous
ANT 324L • Sonic Ethnography
31659 • Spring 2020
Meets TTH 12:30PM-2:00PM WCP 4.118
Wr
ANT 394M • Sensory Ethnography
31860 • Spring 2020
Meets W 9:00AM-12:00PM WCP 5.118
ANT 324L • Anthropology Of Infrastructure
31090 • Fall 2019
Meets F 9:00AM-12:00PM WCP 5.118
IIWr
(also listed as URB 352)
ANT 392M • Intro To Grad Social Anthro
31305 • Fall 2019
Meets T 9:00AM-12:00PM WCP 5.118
ANT 324L • Sonic Ethnography
31650 • Spring 2019
Meets TTH 12:30PM-2:00PM SAC 4.118
Wr
ANT 324L • Sounds Of The City
30799 • Spring 2018
Meets TTH 12:30PM-2:00PM SAC 4.118
ANT 324L • Sounds Of The City
31461 • Fall 2017
Meets MW 10:00AM-11:30AM SAC 4.120
Publications
Books and Special Issues
2021. Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles. Duke University Press
2017 Between Matter and Method: Encounters in Anthropology and the Arts. Co-edited with Gretchen Bakke. London: Bloomsbury.
2016 Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader. Co-edited with Gretchen Bakke. London: Bloomsbury.
2012 Audio Work: Labor, Value, and the Making of Musical Aesthetics. Co-edited with Jesse Shipley. Special issue of Journal of Popular Music Studies 24(4).
2012 Global Downtowns. Co-edited with Gary W. McDonogh. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
2019. Indefinite Urbanism: Airport Noise and Atmospheric Encounters in Los Angeles. Postmodern Culture 29(2).
2017 Atmospheric Sensibilities: Noise, Annoyance, and Indefinite Urbanism. Social Text 35(2)131:69-90.
2016 Emergent Sound: Labor, Materiality, and Nonrepresentational Music. Popular Music Studies 39(3):317-331.
2016 Sensory Attunements: Working with the Past in the Little Cities of Black Diamonds. South Atlantic Quarterly 115(1):89-111.
2013 Sonic Cosmopolitanisms: Experimental Improvised Music and Cultural Exchange. In The Arab Avant-Garde: Musical Innovation in the Middle East, edited by Thomas Burkhalter, Kay Dickinson, and Benjamin J. Harbert. Pp. 185-208. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
2013 Sound Work: Law, Labor and Capital in the 1940s Recording Bans of the American Federation of Musicians. Anthropological Quarterly 86(3):791-824.
2012 Co-authored with Jesse Shipley. Introduction. In Audio Work: Labor, Value, and the Making of Musical Aesthetics. Special issue of Journal of Popular Music Studies 24(4):399-410.
2012 Utopia/Dystopia: The Arts and Downtown Development in Los Angeles. In Global Downtowns, edited by Marina Peterson and Gary W. McDonogh. Pp. 209-233. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
2012 Co-authored with Gary W. McDonogh. Introduction. In Global Downtowns, edited by Marina Peterson and Gary W. McDonogh. Pp. 1-26. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
2010 Garden, City, World: Los Angeles’ Late Twentieth Century Multicultural Arts Festivals. In The Politics of Cultural Programming in Public Spaces, edited by Robert Gehl and Victoria Watts. Pp. 47-61. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
2007 Translocal Civilities: Chinese Modern Dance at Downtown Los Angeles Public Concerts. In Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects, edited by Saskia Sassen. Pp. 41-58. New York: Routledge.
2006 Patrolling the Plaza: Privatized Public Space and the Neoliberal State in Downtown Los Angeles. Urban Anthropology 35(4):355-386.
2003 “Celebrate the World…Celebrate L.A.!”: Public Concerts and the Making of the Global City. Géocarrefour 78(2):139-146.
2003 “World in a Weekend”: Public Concerts and the Emergence of a Transnational Urban Space. Journal of Popular Music Studies 15(2):121-139.
2003 Performing Diversity: The 2002 World Festival of Sacred Music – Los Angeles. Music and Culture 9:107-124.
2002 Performing the “People’s Palace”: Musical Performance and the Production of Space at the Chicago Cultural Center. Space and Culture 5(3):253-264.