G Barrett

G Douglas Barrett is an assistant professor in the television, radio and film program. Active as a scholar and artist, he teaches audio production, experimental music and media studies.

Barrett's scholarship focuses on art music, experimentalism and related interdisciplinary movements in the fine arts since the second world war. Using approaches from musicology, art history and critical theory, Barrett’s research has appeared in a range of international peer-reviewed journals including Cultural Critique, Discourse, Postmodern Culture, Mosaic, Twentieth-Century Music, and Contemporary Music Review. He speaks regularly at international conferences on music, media and contemporary art.

Barrett’s second monograph, “Experimenting the Human: Art, Music, and the Contemporary Posthuman,” appeared in 2023 on the University of Chicago Press. Analyzing musical artworks by Alvin Lucier, Pamela Z, Nam June Paik and Pauline Oliveros, Barrett argues that experimental music speaks to postwar science and technology’s decentering of human agency amid the uneven temporality of global capitalism. His first book, “After Sound: Toward a Critical Music,” was published in 2016.

Barrett’s musical and artistic work has been discussed in Artforum, The Wire, Postmodern Culture, MusikTexte, and Guernica. He has been an artist-in-residence at USF VerftetBergen, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Catwalk Institute. Barrett has received grants from Franklin Furnace, Akademie Schloss Solitude and the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD). His recent networked performance, “I am Sitting in a Zoo (on Zoom),” won the 2022 Tokyo Gen’On Project commission prize.

Barrett has a Ph.D. from SUNY at Buffalo, an M.F.A. from CalArts and a B.Mus. from Berklee College of Music. Prior to Syracuse University, he held assistant professor positions at New Jersey City University and Salisbury University.