John Howland

John Howland is Professor and program chair of Musicology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He currently divides life between work in Trondheim, Norway, and his family's home in Lund, Sweden. He is formerly a professor of music and jazz studies at Rutgers University-Newark. He is an author, scholar, musician, teacher, junkshop historian, tinkerer and maker. His research examines the interrelations among class hierarchy discourse and arranging, production, and entertainment aesthetics in popular music and jazz-related orchestral idioms. He is author of the books "Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz" (University of Michigan Press, 2009), "Duke Ellington Studies" (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and "Hearing Luxe Pop: Glorification, Glamour and the Middlebrow in American Popular Music" (University of California Press, 2021), among other writings and editorial work, and is the former editor and co-founder of the Routledge journal, "Jazz Perspectives." He is currently starting a new book project that extends the themes of "Hearing Luxe Pop" through an examination of disco's turn to the mainstream across 1974–1976 (in time for the disco mainstream's 50th anniversary!).