David Novak (History) has received an ACLS Fellowship for 2026-2027 his project, "Diggers: An Archival Counterhistory of Popular Music." This project explores the globalization of popular music through physical media, focusing on emergent archives of sound recordings in the Global South and in diasporic networks. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork, it describes the material histories of independent labels, file-sharing blogs, and online streaming platforms that contribute to a contemporary decolonial critique of global music history. To “dig” recordings means many things: to foster new exposures and appreciations of lesser-known music cultures; to uncover buried historical knowledge; to reevaluate material artifacts and circulate them into new conditions of value in a deeply uneven transnational economy. In dialogue with a broad network of artists, activists, collectors and archivists in Indonesia, Cambodia, Kurdistan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the book engages with ongoing critiques of field recording, regional music industries, and the online mediation of sonic memory to forge an emergent counterhistory of popular music.