Nathan Smith

Nathan Smith is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Music Department whose research interests lie at the various intersections of popular music, philosophy, and mathematics. His dissertation on the aesthetic category “corn(y)”—tentatively entitled “Opening the Can of Corn”—explores how ideas of the rural circulated within urban jazz discourses in the 1930s and 40s. In tilling this untended field, this research investigates how the shucking of sentiment, novelty, and humor from jazz was inexorably interwoven with a consolidation of urban whiteness, industrial socialist dreams, and the combined conjugation of jazz with the metropole, and the metropole with the nation.