Perry B. Johnson

Background

About Perry B. Johnson

Perry B. Johnson, Ph.D, is a music scholar, cultural historian and lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her primary research and practice focus on music, popular culture and American cultural histories, with an emphasis on archives, public scholarship, power, identity and belonging. She is at work on the manuscript for her first book, a cultural history of sexual misconduct in America’s popular music industries and working to develop an accompanying digital database that captures and maps allegations and incidents of misconduct. Johnson is co-founder and co-director (with Dr. Courtney M. Cox) of The Sound of Victory, an interdisciplinary, multi-platform initiative dedicated to investigating the historic relationship between music/sound and sport. As part of this project, Johnson is also producer and co-host of Sounding Off, a podcast that highlights the voices of athletes, artists, and public intellectuals working at this intersection. Her intellectual practice draws on years of experience producing public programs at academic and cultural institutions to make academic research accessible to non-specialist audiences. Johnson served as researcher/project manager for collaborative projects between USC, the Library Foundation of Los Angeles and the LA Public Library: To Live and Dine in LA, which examined the LAPL’s historic menu collection, and Songs in the Key of L.A, which documented songs that have mediated and mapped the evolution of Southern California. Her work with both involved overseeing the development of related programs, exhibitions and events at such historic Los Angeles venues as the Palace Theatre and the Regent Theater. Johnson was also integral to the success of the region-wide, Getty-funded initiative PST: LA/LA. Johnson received her Ph.D. from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, where she had a graduate affiliation in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies and was a research fellow with The Popular Music Project at USC Annenberg's Norman Lear Center. Prior to returning to Annenberg as an adjunct lecturer, Johnson was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Media at Risk with a joint appointment at the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.