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John Vallier (he/him)

Affiliate Assistant Professor; Curator, Ethnomusicology Archives
John Vallier

Contact Information

(206) 616-1210
Office: 
SUZ 370
Office Hours: 
By appointement
Area of Study: 

Biography

B.A., Philosophy, UC Santa Cruz
MA, Systematic Musicology, UCLA
MLIS, Information Studies, UCLA

John Vallier is curator for the UW Ethnomusicology Archives. With over 100,000 items and more than 1,500 collection, it's one of the largest ethnographic archives of its kind. As curator he stewards a range of archival functions—from preservation to access—for local and worldwide researchers alike. From 2023-2025 Vallier is also UW PI for Native Northwest Online, a multi-partner digital repatriation project led by Professor Kim Christen, Washington State University. Native Northwest Online is UW Libraries' largest preservation and repatriation project to date.

Vallier holds a full-time tenured appointment in Libraries Special Collections, as well as adjunct and affiliate faculty positions in Ethnomusicology, CHIDHonors and Museology. As faculty he offers courses on a range of topics, including music of Seattle, time-based media preservation, remix, and archival repatriation.

Prior to coming to UW, Vallier was UCLA’s ethnomusicology archivist (2002-2006) where he oversaw community outreach grants and the first GRAMMY Foundation funded Indigenous sound recording repatriation project. Prior to that he was a soundtrack composer for Activision Blizzard and a drummer for various bands. More information available here

Research

Courses Taught

Additional Courses

Grunge is for Lo$ers (Spring 2024, UW Comparative History of Ideas (CHID))
Time-Based Media (Winter 2024, UW Museology)
Library Mashup (Fall 2023, UW Honors)
Seattle Sounds (Spring 2022, UW Honors)
Sounds of Cinema (Spring 2022, UW Cinema and Media Studies)
Looted? Ethnomusicology, Archives and Colonial Legacies (Winter 2022, UW Honors)
Ethnomusicology, Archives & Decolonization (Winter 2021, UW Ethnomusicology)
Sound of Cinema (Winter 2019, UW Cinema & Media Studies)
Seattle Sounds (Winter 2019, UW Collegiate Seminar)
Writing About Music (Fall 2018, UW Honors Program)
Remix as Resistance & Discourse (Winter 2018, UW Honors)
Sonic Spain (EFS 2018, UW Study Abroad, Music, and Spanish & Portuguese Studies)

Affiliations

Professional Affiliations: 
Society for Ethnomusicology, Association for Recorded Sound Collections

News & Press

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