Primary Areas, Degrees, and Book Projects
Dr. Bowman’s research and teaching mainly involve North American and British rock, pop, and related types of music, as well as film & television music. He studied at the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto and then earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in its Department of Musicology. His dissertation (“Permanent Change: Rush, Musicians’ Rock, and the Progressive Post-Counterculture”) interprets and contextualizes music by the Canadian progressive/hard rock band Rush. This work includes such themes and methodologies as cultural studies, ideology, identity, technology, and genre. His current book projects are Be Sharp: “The Simpsons” & Music (author; in preparation) and Rush and Philosophy: Always Hopeful, Yet Discontent (co-editor and contributor).
Published Articles and Conference Papers
Dr. Bowman’s writings have appeared in Progressive Rock Reconsidered (Routledge, 2002), Intersections (the journal of the Canadian University Music Society), the Journal of the Society for American Music, Topia Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, ECHO: a music-centered journal, the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, the Grove Dictionary of American Music, and elsewhere. Additional academic and reference articles appeared ca 2008-10 in Studies in Music and the Encyclopedia of the Culture Wars. He has presented papers at international, national, and/or regional meetings of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the Canadian University Music Society, and the American Musicological Society, as well as for additional conferences, meetings, and courses.
University Courses and Seminars Taught
In 2007-08, as a full-time Lecturer in Musicology at UCLA, Dr. Bowman taught music lectures for the interdisciplinary, team-taught, freshman Cluster “America in the Sixties: Politics, Society, and Culture, 1954-1974,” taught undergraduate music history seminars on “Performance/Analysis” and “Popular Music in Appropriation, Covers, Versions, and Parody,” taught a music history course on music from 1888 to 1945, and taught Cluster-related seminars on “American Film Music, 1954-1974” and “Popular Music and Ideology, 1965-1975.” In the fall of 2006, he taught four courses as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Dalhousie University, covering Medieval and Renaissance Music, Music Since 1945, the History of Choral Music, and the History of Jazz. He also taught as a full-time instructor in the Department of Music at the University of Alberta (2002-03, graduate seminars in popular music and film music and undergraduate courses in music theory and analysis) and as a part-time instructor in the Department of Music at the University of Guelph (2006 and 2007, popular music), Georgian College (2003-05, popular music), the University of Waterloo (2001-02, music appreciation and fundamentals of music theory), the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario (2001, popular music), and UCLA (1999-2000, film music).