Phil Ford is an associate professor of musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. His musicological work has dealt especially with postwar American culture and music, as well as sound, performance, philosophy, and the intellectual history of counterculture. The main product of this research has been the monograph Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013). Alongside his peer-reviewed scholarship, Ford has worked in various media of public scholarship since the 1990s. He founded and wrote for the blog Dial ‘M’ for Musicology, which ran from 2006 to 2018.
Since 2018, Ford has co-hosted the arts and philosophy podcast Weird Studies with writer/philosopher J. F. Martel. Weird Studies considers magical, contemplative, and otherwise supernormal styles of thought, feeling, and experience in various contexts, and Ford has pursued these subjects in recent essays for Journal of Musicological Research, North American Review, Daedalus, and in a forthcoming book, co-authored with Martel, titled Weirding (Strange Attractor). Weird Studies is an experiment in conducting a serious intellectual project within the space of content media and uses the serial form of the podcast to sustain an ongoing conversation on art, philosophy, religion, and the Weird. Weird Studies has become the hub of a variety of intellectual projects and the center of a large intellectual community online.
In his IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship project, Ford seeks to expand that community beyond the online world. At the center of this project lies a multiday event that would bring scholars and intellectuals to Indiana University for a series of public and private conversations. These visitors will be defining figures within the intellectual sphere of the Weird—a loose association of thinkers and artists connected by their shared interest in ideas that are hard to think within the accredited institutional bounds of academia. These are ideas pertaining to mysticism, occult magic, and paranormal phenomena such as UFOs, hauntings, telepathy, and spirit mediumship.