Dan DiPiero is a musician, writer, and incoming Assistant Professor of Music at Boston University. His research focuses on the affective connections between aesthetics and politics, with a particular emphasis in U.S. improvised and popular musics.
Dan is the author of Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl, forthcoming with the Tracking Pop series at University of Michigan Press. The first academic monograph to seriously consider feminist indie rock from beyond the 1990s, Big Feelings discusses bands like Soccer Mommy, Indigo De Souza, Vagabon, The Ophelias, SASAMI, and other young artists who are remaking what rock music means in the present moment. It also situates these musicians in essential socio-cultural contexts, helping readers understand how the music matters, and looping in the voices of fans along the way.
Dan’s first book, Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life (University of Michigan Press, 2022), is an interdisciplinary exploration of improvisation as it appears across contexts. Through a series of nested comparisons, it aims to explicate a nuanced understanding of what improvisation is, how it appears, and what it helps us to think about, socially, musically, and politically. Contingent Encounters was a finalist for the International Association for the Study of Popular Music Book Prize in 2023.
Other writing has appeared in Jazz and Culture, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, liquid blackness, Musicology Now, Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation, Rancière and Music (Edinburgh University Press), the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sounding Out!, the Cleveland Review of Books, Audimat, boundary 2 online, and more.
A fierce advocate for popular music studies, Dan is passionate about working in community both within and beyond the academy. In 2022, Dan co-founded the Music and Sound Studies Working Group at the Cultural Studies Association, remains active in the Popular Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society, and currently serves as the secretary of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (US). They regularly present research at conferences such as IASPM, the American Musicological Society, the American Studies Association, the Pop Conference, and more. With Christine Capetola, Dan co-edited a special issue of the journal American Music Perspectives; featuring the work of graduate students and early career scholars, “Sound and Affect in Times of Crisis” was published in early 2023.
An award-winning teacher, Dan has taught interdisciplinary courses across musicology and the humanities. Prior to joining BU, he taught at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Ithaca College, Miami University, and the Ohio State University, where he earned his PhD in the Department of Comparative Studies in 2019. They also hold degrees from the California Institute of the Arts (MA, MFA) and Capital University’s Conservatory (BM). Their principal drum teachers are Joe La Barbera, Bob Breithaupt, and Bill Ransom.
Dan is originally from Cleveland, Ohio; he writes a popular music studies newsletter called cry baby; and is currently working on a project about crushes in popular music.
CV (June, 2025)
