Contact Information
Biography
John Vallier is curator for the UW Ethnomusicology Archives. With over 100,000 items and more than 1,500 collections, it's among the largest university-based ethnographic archives in the Americas. 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 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, CHID, Honors 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
Selected Research
- Lorraine Sakata, Laurel Sercombe, and John Vallier. “Radio Afghanistan Archive Project: Building Capacity, Averting Repatriation.” In Gunderson, F., Lancefield, R., & Woods, B. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation. Oxford University Press.
- "Authorship." Keywords in Remix Studies. Edited by Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, xtine burrough. Routledge.
- Principal Investigator, Pacific Northwest Native American Cylinder and Disc Digitization Project.” CLIR’s Recordings at Risk grant program (funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation): 2019 - 2020.
- "Community Collaboration in Ethnomusicology Archives: Ethical Considerations for Collections Management." ARSC Journal. Association for Recorded Sound Collections. Vol. 52:1 (Spring 2021).
- Minority Report (video game). Composed and performed soundtrack contributions. sActivision Blizzard (2002).
Courses Taught
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)