Stan Hawkins is Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo.
Hawkins has written and edited ten books, as well as contributing to numerous seminal texts in the field of popular music research, including Sexing the Groove (ed. Sheila Whiteley, Routledge 1997), Reading Pop (ed. Richard Middleton, Oxford 2000), Analyzing Popular Music , (ed. Allan F. Moore, Cambridge 2003) Madonna’s Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to her Cultural Transfomations , 1983-2003, (eds. S. Fouz-Hernandez & F. Jarman-Ivens, Ashgate, 2004), Queering the Popular Pitch (eds. J. Rycenga & S. Whiteley, Routledge 2006), Normalitet (eds.Thomas Hylland Eriksen & Jan-Kåre Breivik, Universitetsfolaget 2006), Oh Boy! Masculinities and Popular Music (ed. F. Jarman-Ivens, Routledge, 2007), Musicological Identities: Essays in Honor of Susan McClary (eds. S. Baur, R. Knapp, & J. Warwick, Ashgate 2008), Britpop and the English Music Tradition (eds. a. Bennett and J. Stratton, Ashgate 2010) and Morrissey: Fandom, Rrepresentations and Identities (eds. E. Devereux, A. Dillane, and M. J. Power, Intellect, 2011). He has also contributed to The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (2009), edited by Derek Scott, as well as editing a volume in The Library of Essays on Popular Music, Pop Music and Easy Listening (2011, Ashgate). He has served on the editorial board of Critical Musicology Online and was editor of the Norwegian Musicological Journal, Studia Musicologica Norvegicafrom 2004 to 2007 and Popular Musicology Online from 1990-2011. He is also a member of the international editorial boards of Popular Musicology Online, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Popular Music, the Swedish Journal for Music Research (STM-Online), and the South African Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa. He has contributed numerous articles to Gads Musikleksikon, Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World and Bakers Encyclopedia of Popular Music.
Hawkins has been active in IASPM (The International Association for the Study of Popular Music), where he served as President of the UK branch from 1991 to 1994, and the Norwegian representative of the Nordic branch of IASPM, from 1996 to 2004. At the Department of Musicology, Oslo University, he was a key researcher in the strategic research project, CULCOM, a programme that involved five faculties: The Faculty of Humanities, the Faculty of Law, the Faculty of Social Sciences, the Faculty of Theology and Faculty of Education. Under the leadership of Thomas Hylland Eriksen, one of Norway’s leading anthropologists. Part of this research involved a joint project with music anthropologist, Jan Sverre Knudsen, Musical Bonds & Boundaries, which opened up a dialogue that contributed to a greater understanding of the musical-making phenomena found in contemporary Norwegian society. Hawkins has also been involved in various projects in Finland, including, Contemporary Music, Media and Mediation (CMMM), at the Department of Music, University of Jvyäskyla, Finland. This project was engaged with contemporary music as a cultural phenomenon, with particular reference to the relationship between music and visual media, and to the influence of technology on musical production, performance, and reception. In 2009 the Norwegian Research Council awarded a grant to fund a four year project proposed by Hawkins, entitled ‘Popular Music and Gender in a Transcultural Context‘, which ran from 2010-2014.
Undergraduate and postgraduate courses taught at Oslo and Agder University (adjunct professor 2006-2022), have included Gender and Popular Music, Music Analysis, Music & Cultural Studies, Music & Media, and Music & Identity and graduate seminars that explore conjunctions between pop music, interpretation, gender theory, representation politics, aesthetics, and musicological analysis.
From 2009-2019, he was commissioning editor for the iconic series, Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series (with Derek Scott and thereafter Lori Burns), which involved over 100 commissions. In recognition of his international contribution to music research and education, Hawkins was elected life time member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 2017. In 2021 an anthology Popular Musicology and Identity: Essays in Honour of Stan Hawkins, edited by Kai Arne Hansen, Eirik Askerøi and Freya Jarman, with contributions from key scholars in the field, paid tribute to his work in the diverse field of popular musicology.