James Gabrillo

James Gabrillo is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses on digital musicology, ethnography, global pop music, and performance cultures of the Philippines. He serves as a faculty fellow at UT's Humanities Institute Seminar on Digital Futures and Social Justice, and is the principal investigator of the Sound Space Art Lab multimedia research initiative.

Dr. Gabrillo's research focuses on the intersections of music, digital media, and cultural politics, with particular attention to Philippine musical practices and Filipino diasporic communities. His work spans digital musicology, ethnographic fieldwork, and multimedia scholarship, examining how sound and music operate within contemporary cultural and political contexts. His book Pop Convergence (Oxford University Press) examines the aesthetics and networks of musical multimedia in contemporary Manila.

His scholarly contributions reveal emerging trends in the study of digital music cultures, with increasing attention to the global dimensions of pop music, the materiality of sound in digital contexts, and the political dimensions of musical practice. His research has been published in leading journals including the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Musical Quarterly, and Rock Music Studies.

Dr. Gabrillo was previously a lecturer at The New School and a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, where he developed a digital humanities project mapping soundscapes of migrant Filipino caregivers. He earned his PhD from Peterhouse, Cambridge, and prior to his academic career worked as a journalist and arts editor for publications including The National, Al Jazeera English, Wired, Philippine Daily Inquirer, and The Japan Times.

He maintains an active scholarly profile with regular publications in top journals and is also affiliated with Cambridge Digital Humanities as an associate, demonstrating his commitment to interdisciplinary research that connects traditional musicological methods with digital humanities approaches.