Dr. Erin Smith

Dr. Erin Smith comes to OU from University of California, Santa Barbara where she served as the Librarian for Music and Collection Strategist for the Fine and Performing Arts areas. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio where she discovered a lifelong love of librarianship, becoming that institution’s Librarian for the Humanities and Instruction and Outreach Librarian. Her research interests include investigations into the ways popular culture can aid libraries in instruction and outreach efforts via zines, graphic novels, and music. She also maintains an active profile in Musicology, having published on popular music topics that range from Led Zeppelin’s aural representations of an imaginary American South to the witchy sounds and imagery conjured by the British indie rock band Florence + the Machine. Her current research involves examining how music functions in J.R.R Tolkien’s influential fantasy works such as The Lord of the Rings, investigating how his literary descriptions of music map onto twentieth- and twenty-first century adaptations of his work, the better to understand how modern composers and listeners construct meaning out of the hero and the adversary, the local and the global, the familiar and the strange.