He specializes in music and cinema, the topic of an essay collection that he edited and of his book in progress, and in the work of Theodor Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School as that work addresses itself to music or can be used “to sharpen the critical edge of music theory.” James will bring to the “Modernity” seminar current research on how technological innovations of the cinematic apparatus transform the place and function of music in the sound space of the cinema, a project “intimately bound up with modernism inasmuch as the modern subject itself reflects the development of representational technologies capable of distribution through mechanical reproduction and/or electronic transmission.”