Paula Harper

Paula Clare Harper is a musicologist who researches music, sound, and the internet. She is interested in putting digital ephemera and oddities into broader context, in hearing the musicality of online meme cultures, and in tracking music’s creation and circulation across digital platforms and communities. Her book Viral Music and the Rise of Noisy Platforms (UChicago Press, 2027) documents the early 21st-century rise of ubiquitous social media platforms through an understanding of them as mechanisms for facilitating virality—a virality that is deeply sonic, and that can be productively analyzed as musicking.

Additionally, Harper’s research interests in music, gender, and digital fandom intersect with ongoing work on pop divas such as Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. After co-convening the conference Taylor Swift Study Day: Eras, Narrative, Digital Music and Media in the summer of 2021, she co-edited the volume Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans (Routledge, 2025). This edited collection uses Swift as a lens through which to analyze a variety of timely issues in contemporary digital culture and music—from songwriting and copyright, to constructions of race and gender, to fandom and digital reception.