Samantha Bennett is Professor of Music and Associate Dean Higher Degree Research at the Australian National University, and Chair of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). Her research interests bridge music and science and technology studies, and focus on sound recording, music production, music technologies, and the analysis of technology and process in recorded popular music. She is currently working on two research projects: the first, a large-scale technological, musicological, practice-led, and sociopolitical investigation of the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument, and the second, as research assistant to Muruwari research lead Roy Barker Jr on the sound recording, technology and audio archive aspects of his project 'Muruwari Ngulli Yaandibu' (Muruwari we speak). 

Samantha is the author, co-author, and co-editor of six books including her latest, Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies (The MIT Press, co-authored with Associate Professor Eliot Bates (CUNY)) and Secrets and Revelatory Discourse in Music and Audio Technology Culture (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press), and two further monographs - Modern Records, Maverick Methods: Technology and Process in Popular Music Record Production 1978-2000 (Bloomsbury Academic) and Peepshow, a 33 1/3 series edition on the album by Siouxsie and the Banshees (Bloomsbury Academic). She is also the co-editor of Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound (Bloomsbury Academic) and Popular Music, Stars and Stardom (ANU Press). Samantha’s journal articles are published in Popular Music, Popular Music and Society, Convergence, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and IASPM@journal and her technical papers are published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. In 2014, Samantha gave the biannual American Musicological Society Lecture at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum Library and Archives where she also held a research fellowship in 2015. She is on the editorial board of the Cambridge Elements in Popular Music (CUP) series, and an advisory board member and editor of Bloomsbury Academic’s 33 1/3 series. Prior to her work in academia, Samantha worked extensively as an audio engineer in multiple London recording studios and is a former Director of the UK's Music Producer's Guild. She is an elected board member of the DDCA (Deans and Directors of the Creative Arts), and an active member of the Audio Engineering Society, the Society for Music Production Research, and a number of Working Class Academic and Leadership networks.

As an educator, Samantha has twenty years curriculum design, authorship and quality management experience across FE/TAFE, teaching intensive, and research intensive Universities. She has held numerous external consultant and examiner positions at overseas Universities and is the recipient of multiple teaching awards, notably, an Australian Award for University Teaching (2020), the Vice Chancellor's Award for Education Excellence and a Vice Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence at the Australian National University (2019) and a Vice Chancellor’s Teaching Fellowship at the University of Westminster (2012). She is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Since arriving at the Australian National University in 2013, she has authored a broad music technology and popular music curriculum and, after securing a $250,000 major equipment grant, led the refurbishment of the School of Music's recording studio facilities to include the installation of a 48-channel Neve Genesys console and a blend of vintage and contemporary microphones and processors.