Tom Western is an ethnomusicologist researching the relations between sound, borders, displacements and citizenships. His current research centres on Athens, Greece, and at the RSC he will be working on a project titled ‘Aural Borders, Audible Displacements: Sound and Citizenship in Athens’. This sits at the intersections of forced migration studies, ethnomusicology, sound studies and anthropology.

Tom’s doctoral research explored how sound recordings were used to construct nations and borders in postwar Europe, and how migration was silenced in the process. His first book – National Phonography: Field Recording, Sound Archiving, and Producing the Nation in Music – is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic Press in 2019. He has also published in the journals Sound Studies, Twentieth-Century Music, Ethnomusicology Forum, and in several edited books. Outside of academia, Tom is an association member of a grassroots refugee community centre in Athens, and plays in a band with musicians from Syria, Nigeria and Greece in the same city.