Academia
Dr Jacob Mallinson Bird MA, MSt, DPhil, DipABRSM
Affiliated Lecturer, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge
Lecturer in Music, The Queen’s College, University of Oxford
Lecturer in Music, Somerville College, University of Oxford
Praeceptor in Music, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge
My academic research centres around queer performance, with a particular interest in the intersections of sound studies, voice studies, and queer theory.
My doctoral research — Becoming Queen: Voices, Bodies, and Technologies in Drag Lip-Sync Performance — followed five London-based drag queens and sought to understand not only why drag queens choose to lip-sync (when they could very well perform in any other way) but also to theorise lip-syncing as a mode of voicing in its own right. This research was conducted at Oxford University under the supervision of Professor Jason Stanyek and has been published in Sound Studies and Contemporary Music Review, with a forthcoming monograph published by Bloomsbury.
My current research explores contemporary noise music in queer scenes. I explore noise and queerness as syncretic methodologies, each term putting pressure on the other. This research formed the Queer Noise paper in the Prelims course at Oxford.
I am also currently working on an article about ‘brain rot’ in the work of bbno$.
Publications
Forthcoming, 2027. Becoming Queen: Voices, Bodies, and Technologies in Drag Lip-Sync Performance. Bloomsbury.
2026. ‘Ghostly Voices’. In The Routledge Companion to Voice and Identity, 1st edn, by Amy Skjerseth, Freya Jarman, and Naomi Andre. Routledge.
2022. ‘Drag Lip-Sync Performance as Otobiography: Finding a Voice through the Voice of an Other’. Riffs 6 (1): 8–16.
2020a. ‘Haptic Aurality: On Touching the Voice in Drag Lip-Sync Performance’. Sound Studies 6 (1): 45–64.
2020b. ‘The Cyborg Queen: Lip-Syncing and Posthumanism in ShayShay’s “Mutual Core”’. Contemporary Music Review 39 (5): 526–43.
Becoming Queen — monograph publication, Bloomsbury Academic
Exploring the academically uncharted domain of drag lip-sync performance through ethnographic research with five London-based drag queens, Becoming Queen theorizes lip-syncing both as a unique performative medium and as a mode of self-construction for the performing queen.
Popularly reviled and publicly ridiculed, lip-syncing is most often associated with inauthenticity, fakery, and deception: why then has it become the ne plus ultra of drag performance? Far from the criticism of stars like Britney and Milli Vanilli, drag queens have elevated lip-syncing to the apex of their craft, praised for their skill, ingenuity, humour, and heart. Becoming Queen asks how this came to pass and interrogates why lip-syncing is such a powerful art form, focusing on the lives and work of five London-based drag performers.
This text approaches lip-syncing with two questions in mind: 1) what is lip-syncing? and 2) why are drag queens so drawn to this mode of performance, over any other? Drawing on voice studies, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and queer theory, Becoming Queen dissects lip-syncing as a mode of voicing. I argue that lip-syncing is, in fact, not dissimilar to many of our more quotidian acts of speech: unveiling lip-syncing reveals more about the strangeness of voice than it does the fallacy of lip-syncing. Moreover, rather than an alienating act of deception, lip-syncing in such contexts can be a self-affirming performance, one in which the performing queen speaks alongside her own queer idols and pop stars, stitching together multiple bodies and voices into a patchwork of polyvocality.
This book underscores the stakes of lip-syncing in London's contemporary drag scene: what lip-syncing is, and why it matters.
Lecture Series
Postdoctoral Work
‘Toward a New Hearing for Rap’. University of Oxford under Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith. 2025–6.