G Douglas Barrett

G Douglas Barrett is an assistant professor in the television, radio and film department. He teaches courses in audio production, media studies, and music and sound studies.

Barrett is a co-founder and co-leader of “Posthumanities: Arts and Sciences,” a focus group at SU’s BioInspired Institute that promotes new areas of intellectual exchange through collaborations between the arts, humanities and sciences. He is also a current faculty fellow in the University-wide Autonomous Systems Policy Institute (ASPI), an initiative that focuses on the intersection of technology, society and policy.

Barrett’s research looks at how recent musical and artistic practices address contemporary social and cultural issues: from the ethics of science and technology to the critique of political economy to representations of race, gender and sexuality. He approaches these topics using methods from the humanities, including historical musicology, critical theory, art history and criticism, sound studies and media theory.

Barrett’s second monograph, “Experimenting the Human: Art, Music, and the Contemporary Posthuman,” appeared in 2023 on the University of Chicago Press. Analyzing works by Alvin Lucier, Pamela Z, Nam June Paik and Pauline Oliveros, Barrett argues that this experimental music reflects on 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.

In addition to these books, Barrett’s research has appeared in international peer-reviewed journals such as Cultural Critique, Discourse, Postmodern Culture, Mosaic, Twentieth-Century Music and Contemporary Music Review. He regularly presents his work at conferences from groups such as the American Musicological Society (AMS), the College Art Association (CAA), AI Music Studies (AIMS) and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP).

He is currently working on two projects: a monograph on music and planetary crisis and an edited volume on space art.

Barrett has a Ph.D. from SUNY at Buffalo, an M.F.A. from CalArts and a B.Mus. from Berklee College of Music.