Allyson Rogers

Adjunct Professor; Jazz Camp Instructor (drums)

• Ph.D. Communication Studies, McGill University; M.A. Music and Culture, Carleton University; B.Mus. University of Alberta

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My research is situated at the intersection of music, media, and politics, with a focus on the Canadian context. As a music and media scholar, I have expertise in film music, sound studies, jazz and popular music, twentieth-century western art music, and sound recording history and technologies.
 
My current book project, Sounding the Nation: Music and Sound at the National Film Board of Canada, 1939-79, traces the development of film music aesthetics and their transformation across shifts within the NFB, as it responded to changes in state policies and the broader sociopolitical context. Among other themes, it explores the NFB’s connection to the twentieth-century avant-garde, the role of anti-Communism in shaping the postwar musical agenda, the centrality of whiteness in the choice of music and sound, and the NFB’s interdependence with other major Canadian cultural institutions.
 
I am co-editor of a forthcoming collection, Music and Antifascism: Cultures of Resistance in Europe and North America (Routledge, 2026), an anthology that examines antifascist strategies through music from the historic European fascist regimes to the present. This volume includes chapters on leftist labour choirs in interwar England, postwar Socialist Realist opera in Hungary, Czech post-socialist punk bands, antifascist festivals in Cyprus, and resistance songs in present-day Ukraine.
 
My research has been supported by a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2024-26), SSHRC Canadian Graduate Scholarship, SSHRC Connection Grant, McGill University, and the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. In 2022, I was the recipient of the SOCAN/MusCan prize for writing on Canadian music.
 
I have taught courses on twentieth-century western art music, music and politics, and the history of communication at McGill and Carleton.

Publications

Books

Daniel, Ondřej, Allyson Rogers, and James K. Wright, eds. Music and Antifascism: Cultures of Resistance in Europe and North America. London: Routledge, in print November 23, 2026.
 
Wright, James K. and Allyson Rogers. They Shot, He Scored: The Life and Music of Eldon Rathburn. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019.

Book Chapters

Rogers, Allyson. “Black Sound, White Gaze: Musical Representation of Nationalist Mythologies in the NFB’s Candid Eye Television Series.” In The Oxford Handbook for Music and Television, edited by James Deaville, Jessica Getman, Ronald Rodman, and Brooke McCorkle. Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2026.
 
Couture, Sadie, Randolph Jordan, Burç Kostem, Landon Morrison, Michael Nardone, Shirley Roburn, Allyson Rogers, Mehak Sawhney, Jonathan Sterne, Andy Kelleher Stuhl, and Hannah Tollefson. “Sensate Sovereignty: A Dialogue on Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies.” Reprinted in Convivialities: Dialogues on Poetics, edited by Michael Nardone. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2025.

Articles

Rogers, Allyson and Gale Franklin. “Petro-masculine Soundscapes: Music, Sound, and Violence at the 2022 Ottawa Convoy Occupation.” Transposition : Musiques et sciences sociales no. 13 (2025) « Musique et les droites ». Paris : École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS).  https://journals.openedition.org/transposition/9630