public-professor-emily-gale
Join us for a new season of the PUBlic Professor Series! View 2025/26 Schedule
Return to main pageRead the media release
Dr. Emily Gale
Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People
Feeling remains critical to how and why most listeners engage with popular song. A deep dive into sentimental pop music, however, reveals persistent judgement and suspicion; “overly emotional,” “pathetic,” “mawkish” and “cloying” are just a few of the adjectives that surface when tuning into the history of the most popular English-language songs of the last 250 years. What does an 1855 sentimental song sheet that sold approximately 20 million copies reveal about gender and race in antebellum culture? How did a 1960s singalong television show inform notions of belonging and American citizenship during the US Civil Rights movement? Join Dr. Emily Gale as her talk listens beyond a straightforward account of embarrassing guilty pleasures to reveal the unexpected political histories of sentimental songs and why we should take these sounded feelings seriously.
Dr. Emily Gale is a feminist music scholar and Assistant Professor of Musicology/Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music. Her book in progress, Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People: An Unheard History of US Popular Music, analyses the politics of affect and sentimentality within US popular musics from the late 18th century to the present. Chapters on love, youth, death, tears, home and feels tune in to the counter public reverberations of a repertory long-considered trite, and even embarrassing, revealing unlikely entanglements. Emily has been broadcasting radio shows about this research since 2019 (on SUB_ʇXƎʇ and on UCC98.3FM) and her voice appears as a pop commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered and in the Los Angeles Times.