Alyssa Cottle
Office: TC 436
Email: acottle2@uwo.ca
Alyssa Cottle is a musicologist who specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first century Latin America. Her book project, Music, Memory, and the Democratic Path to Socialism in Chile, 1967–1973, examines music and sound in and beyond Chile in the years leading up to and during Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government (1970–73). In the book, Cottle draws new connections between local and transnational networks of musical exchange and political activism during the global Cold War. In doing so, she expands the musical landscape of Allende’s Chile beyond popular song to include Western classical music performance, avant-garde composition, relationships between Indigenous communities and the Chilean state-owned record label, and soundscapes of street protest and counterprotest. Music, Memory, and the Democratic Path to Socialism in Chile argues that music and sound were sites of negotiation, where new social worlds were imagined. Furthermore, her book proposes a new approach to music historiography that accounts not only for what occurred, but also for the once-possible futures that have been arrested, unrealized and lost. Research for this project has been supported by the U.S. Fulbright Student Program, the Society for American Music and Harvard University, and writing from this project has been awarded the Paul A. Pisk Prize from the American Musicological Society.
Cottle is also engaged in questions concerning intersections between music, sound, textiles and the fibre arts. She is currently undertaking research on a transnational community of Latin American electronic musicians and artists who have been designing, building and performing with original electronic musical instruments based on the Andean khipu, a textile data storage device used by Andeans before and during the Incan Empire.
Cottle earned a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from Harvard University in 2025 and a B.A. magna cum laude in Music from Occidental College in 2015. She is currently a Western Postdoctoral Fellow at the Don Wright Faculty of Music at Western University.
