Stephen R. Millar is Lecturer in Anthropology and Ethnomusicology. His research and teaching focuses on music, conflict, and cultures of resistance, with an emphasis on Britain and Ireland. He is particularly interested in the social impact of music-making and his work uses music as a platform to examine some of the most pressing concerns of our times, including militant nationalism, social inclusion, and the legacy of colonialism. 

 

Stephen has written on topics ranging from football culture and state censorship to the role of music in engaging hard-to-reach young people, and from music as (post)colonial struggle to community experiences of sectarianism. His work has been published in a broad range of academic journals, including the British Journal of Music Education, Ethnomusicology Forum, Health & Social Care in the Community, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Managing Sport and Leisure, Music & Politics, Popular Music, Popular Music and Society, Race & Class, and Scottish Affairs. Stephen is co-editor of Football and Popular Culture (Routledge 2021) and Football, Politics, and Identity (Routledge 2021).

 

Stephen's first book Sounding Dissent: Rebel Songs, Resistance, and Irish Republicanism (University of Michigan Press 2020) explores how Irish republicans have used rebel songs to resist against the hegemonic power of the British state. Drawing on three years of sustained fieldwork within the rebel music scene, the book challenges the parameters of the postcolonial and reconceptualises political resistance through sound, using rebel songs to understand the history of political violence in Ireland. Sounding Dissent has received excellent reviews across a range of journals and disciplines including Ethnomusicology Forum, Irish Political Studies, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Oral History, and Popular Music. It was awarded a High Commendation in the British Association for Irish Studies Book Prize (2021).

 

Stephen's current book project, under contract with Oxford University Press, examines the interconnection between Ulster loyalist songs and political violence in Northern Ireland from the Troubles to the present. Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the project unravels the role songs play in inciting violence during war and legitimising structural violence during peace, examining their embeddedness in paramilitarism and inter-communal conflict. It explores why musicians and audiences continue to consume loyalist songs, and how, in the wake of Brexit, such songs form part of a cultural nostalgia for multiple and intersecting imagined pasts, which resonate with the rise of populism in other parts of the world. The project is the first of its kind and will include an online archive of political music-making. ‘Songs of the Northern Ireland Conflict’ (SoNIC) will show how political song of diverging persuasions commented on and connected with the social and political landscape in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and how political song continues to shape present-day issues and identities.