缅北禁地

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Staff Profile

Dr Oskar Cox Jensen

UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in Music

  • Personal Website:
Background

I joined 缅北禁地 in October 2022 after holding research fellowships in Politics (), History (), and Music (). Though I took three degrees in History (Christ Church, Oxford 2006–13) and have flirted with English Literature, I’m making my home in Music for a project on mainstream song from 1520 to the present day. I’m interested both in how song has evolved and endured over the centuries, and in what its study can reveal about our shared cultural, social, and political history. From October 2025, this became the UKRI FLF project, Mainstream Song, Class, and Culture, 1520–2020.

 

My interests have always centred on a mix of song, street culture, and politics, reflected in my first trade book, , which was shortlisted for the ; books on  and ; collaborations on the Georgian polymath  and the politics of ; and the website for , a major project on protest song. I seem to be increasingly prone to singing in public and when giving papers. I’m a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Higher Education Academy, because collegiality and good teaching are important. I’m also a  and AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker, because there’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more. I am represented by .


My personal website is



Research

My research generally relates to one or both of a) song, and b) street culture, while my empirical focus tends to be on British history – though always within a global context.

These are currently united in my FLF project, Mainstream Song, Class, and Culture, 1520–2020. I'm interested in what song can tell us about cultural and social history in the longue durée, as well as in the long and slow evolution of song as a dominant, ubiquitous cultural form. I think it's a brilliant and often uncomfortable story, and that, since the invention of cheap print, we have under-rated the centrality of song to western culture generally.

The earliest key strand of my research is probably song in relation to the intersection of culture and politics, national identity, radicalism and loyalism. This is manifest most obviously in: my first book, ; a special issue of  I co-edited with David Kennerley on Music and Politics in Britain; and the project , based at UEA, examining five centuries of English protest song.

The second key theme is street culture, especially that of London. See my second monograph  and my first trade book, , which seeks to use human interest and bottom-up biography as a methodology.

Theatrical culture is also central to my research. See, for example, the volume , co-edited with David Kennerley and Ian Newman.

I'm an active member of a number of research networks, such as 缅北禁地's own , the , and the .

Performance and public engagement are key aspects of my research, both in practice-as-research and as outputs. I'm trying to never write or talk about a song without first having at least tried to sing it (or convinced someone else to!)

Teaching

My teaching is currently limited to ad-hoc lectures and PhD supervision.

Publications

  • Articles

    • Cox Jensen O. . Yale Journal of Music and Religion 2022, 8(2), 6.
    • Cox Jensen O. . Journal of British Studies 2021, 60(2), 375-388.
    • Cox Jensen O. . Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 2019, 46, 136–160.
    • Cox Jensen O. . Studies in Romanticism 2019, 58(4), 545-569.
    • Cox Jensen O, Robinson J, Whipday E. . Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 2017, 43(2), 160-182.
    • Cox Jensen O. . Studies in Romanticism 2017, 56(3), 341-359.
    • Cox Jensen O. . Cultural and Social History 2014, 11(2), 195-216.

  • Authored Books

    • Street J, Cox Jensen O, Finlayson A, McShane A, Worley M. . Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025.
    • Jensen O. . London: Viper Books, 2025.
    • Jensen O. . London: Viper Books, 2024.
    • Jensen O. . London: Duckworth Books, 2022.
    • Cox Jensen O. . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
    • Jensen O. . London: Hot Key / Piccadilly Press, 2016.
    • Jensen O. . London: Hot Key / Piccadilly Press, 2016.
    • Cox Jensen O. . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

  • Book Chapters

    • Cox Jensen O. . In: Charlotte Grant, Alistair Robinson, ed. Cultures of London: Legacies of Migration. London: Bloomsbury, 2024.
    • Cox Jensen O. . In: James Grande, Brian Murray, ed. Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London: Bloomsbury, 2023, pp.29-48.
    • Cox Jensen O. . In: Atkinson D; Roud S, ed. Cheap Print and Street Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023, pp.195-218.
    • Cox Jensen O. . In: James Grande, Carmel Raz, ed. Sound and Sense in British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp.60-89.
    • Cox Jensen O. . In: Carter S; Gibson K; Southey R, ed. Music in North-East England, 1500–1800. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2020.
    • Cox Jensen O. . In: O'Shaughnessy D, ed. Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp.79-98.
    • Cox Jensen O. . In: Parker R; Rutherford S, ed. London Voices: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019, pp.15-32.
    • Cox Jensen O. . In: Cox Jensen O; Kennerley D; Newman I, ed. Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp.115–136.
    • Buurman E, Cox Jensen O. . In: Katherine Astbury, Mark Philp, ed. Napoleon’s Hundred Days and the Politics of Legitimacy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp.209-232.

  • Digital or Visual Media

    • Cox Jensen O, Finlayson A, McShane A, Street J, Worley M. . 2022. Website.

  • Edited Book

    • Cox Jensen O, Kennerley D, Newman I, ed. . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.