Dan DiPiero

Dan DiPiero is a musician, writer, and 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 music.

Dan is the author of Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl, published with the Tracking Pop series at University of Michigan Press in 2025. 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 shortlisted for the International Association for the Study of Popular Music Book Prize in 2023.

Other writing has appeared in a variety of academic and public-facing outlets, including the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Jazz & Culture, the Los Angeles Review of Books, boundary 2 online, Talk Vomit, Sounding Out!, the Cleveland Review of Books, and more. Currently, Dan is working on a project about the concept of the crush and its entanglements with popular music.

A fierce advocate for popular music studies, Dan is passionate about working in community both in 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 served as the secretary of IASPM-US from 2024–2026. They have presented work at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and publish both a newsletter and podcast on popular music studies.

Recent/forthcoming publications include:

• “Jazz as Indie Music,” Journal of Jazz Studies (forthcoming)
• “Femme Aesthetics and Tragic Heterosexuality: Sabrina Carpenter’s Critique of Gender,” Journal of the American Musicological Society (forthcoming)
• “‘Be Sweet’: Reflections On the Indie/Pop Nexus,” in The Oxford Handbook of Pop Music, edited by Eric Weisbard (Oxford University Press, 2026)
• “Nonfiction at the End of the Humanities: on Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now and Alia Hanna Habib’s Take It from Me: An Agent’s Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch, Cleveland Review of Books, May 19, 2026.
• Co-authored with Anthony Reed, “Our Ears Are Audience to the Birth of Song: A Conversation on Black Aesthetics,” Liquid Blackness special issue, “Exercises in Joyful Improvisational Practice,” 9 vol. 1(2025): 31–53.
• “Gender, Genre, and the Shifting Meaning of Indie Rock,” Society for U.S. Intellectual History blog, October 27, 2025.
• “Queer Affects and Big Feelings: On the I Saw the TV Glow Soundtrack,” Musicology Now, April 15, 2025.
• Review of Robin James’ The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence (University of North Carolina Press), Journal of the Society for American Music 19 no. 1(2025): 64-66.
• “Race, Gender, and Jazz School: Chord-Scale Theory as White Masculine Technology,” Jazz & Culture 6 vol. 1(2023): 52–77.
• “Voice, Freedom, Anachronism: On Moten/Lopez/Cleaver,” Cleveland Review of Books, January 13, 2023.

For more information, see http://dandipiero.com