Simon Music Center, M225D
Education
- Ph.D., Musicology, Cornell University, 2019
- M.A., History, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2013
- B.A., Anthropology, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2004
Sergio Ospina-Romero is assistant professor of music in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He is a musician, anthropologist, cultural historian, and musicologist. His academic work focuses on imperialism, coloniality, sound recording, Latin American music, and jazz in the early twentieth century.
Ospina-Romero is the author of three books: Dolor que canta (ICANH, 2017), La conquista discográfica de América Latina (Gourmet Musical, 2024), and Talking Machine Empires (Oxford University Press, 2026). He has published several articles, book chapters, and short pieces that have appeared in journals, books, and blogs across the Americas.
Publication outlets include the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Ethnnomusicology, Twentieth Century Music, Keyboard Perspectives, Latin American Music Review, Journal of Folklore Research, Musicology Now, Revista Argentina de Musicología, Resonancias, Boletín Música, Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura, Maguaré, Historia y Sociedad, Goliardos Ensayos: Historia y Teoría del Arte, and BanRep Cultural.
Ospina-Romero was awarded the 2025 IU Outstanding Junior Faculty Award and a Trustees Teaching Award in 2024. He was one of the inaugural IU Arts and Presidential Fellows in 2022-23. Other awards and recognitions include the Klaus P. Wachsmann Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Cornell University’s Donald J. Grout Memorial Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship, and honorary mentions at the Otto Mayer Serra Award and the Premio de Musicología de Casa de las Américas.
He has taught at Cornell University, the Universidad de los Andes, the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. He is an active member of various academic associations, including the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, and Latin American Branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music.
Ospina-Romero is the director and pianist of the Latin jazz quartet Palonegro and of the salsa orchestra La salsoteca.
Selected Publications and Recordings
BOOKS:
Talking Machine Empires: Phonograph Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean During the Acoustic Era (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2026).
La conquista musical de América Latina, 1903-1926. Buenos Aires: Gourmet Musical Ediciones, 2024.
Dolor que canta. La vida y la música de Luis A. Calvo en la sociedad colombiana de comienzos del siglo XX. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2017.
El sonido que seremos. Historias y practicas musicales en Colombia. [Co-edited with Rondy F. Torres]. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes y Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2024.
ARTICLES, BOOK CHAPTERS, and SHORT PIECES:
“The Dawn of the Jazz Age in the Caribbean: Dance, Consumer Culture, and the Imperial Shape of Modern Entertainment.”Twentieth-Century Music Vol. 20, No. 3 (October 2023), 347–377.
“Swinging con sabrosura: Lucho Bermúdez y la era del jazz en el Caribe” in Músicas y prácticas sonoras en el Caribe colombiano, Vol. 2. Federico Ochoa and Juan Sebastián Rojas, eds. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (2023), 17-55.
“Recording Studios on Tour: Traveling Ventures at the Dawn of the Music Industry,” in Phonographic encounters: Mapping transnational cultures of sound, 1890-1945. Elodie A. Roy and Eva Moreda Rodriguez, eds. London: Routledge (2021), 17-39.
“Vidas después de la muerte y otros desafíos biográficos: música, performatividad y viajes en el tiempo.”Boletín Música, Casa de las Américas, No. 58, julio-diciembre (2022): 3–7.
“‘El final que nunca acaba’, o la vida póstuma de los músicos.”Revista Argentina de Musicología, Vol. 22, No.1 (2021), 77–99.
“Ghosts in the Machine and Other Tales around a ‘Marvelous Invention.’ Player-Pianos in Latin America in the Early Twentieth Century.”Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Spring 2019), 1–42.
“On Pianolas and Pianolists: Human-Machine Interactions, Dialectic Soundings, and the Musicality of Mechanical Reproduction,”Keyboard Perspectives 11 (2018), 207–26.
“Latinoamérica a lo Calle 13,”BanRep Cultural, March 2, 2022.
RECORDINGS:
“Ringuiringuitos,”“Palonegro-ing 2.0,” and “Tonces qué?” with Palonegro (2024)
Two minutes apart (album), with Palonegro (2019).
More info and publications: Academia.