Biography

David Suisman specializes in cultural history, war & society, the history of music, sound studies, and the history of capitalism. His scholarly interests also include media studies, the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of film and photography, intellectual property, and critical theory.

Prof. Suisman is the author of Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers (University of Chicago Press, 2024), winner of the ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thompson Book Prize and the Greg Tate Book Prize of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, US Branch. His previous books include Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard University Press, 2009), which was named one of Choice’s “Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009” and received the Hagley Prize for the Best Book in Business History, the DeSantis Book Prize of the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and several other honors; and, as co-editor, Capitalism and the Senses (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023) and Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Prof. Suisman received his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from Columbia University, where his dissertation won the Bancroft Dissertation Prize.

Prof. Suisman has been a Mellon Regional Faculty Fellow of the Penn Humanities Forum; a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley; an affiliate writer at the Headlands Center for the Arts; and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. From 2010 to 2021, Suisman was associate editor and book review editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies.

Publications

Books

Instrument of War: Music and Making of America's Soldiers (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

• Winner, ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thompson Book Prize
• Winner, Greg Tate Book Prize of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, US Branch

Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard University Press, 2009).

• Winner, DeSantis Book Prize, Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
• Winner, Hagley Prize, Business History Conference
• Honorable Mention, Woody Guthrie Prize, International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), U.S. branch
• Certificate of Merit, Best Historical Research in General Sound Recording, Association of Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC)
• Named one of Choice’s “Outstanding Academic Titles of 2009”
• Selected as one of the Top Ten Books of 2009 by Washington City Paper

Capitalism and the Senses, co-editor with Regina Lee Blaszczyk (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).

Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, co-editor with Susan Strasser (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).