"Georgina Emma Mary Born, OBE, FBA (born 15 November 1955) is a British academic, anthropologist and musician. As a musician she is known as Georgie Born and is known for her work in Henry Cow and with Lindsay Cooper.

Born was born on 15 November 1955 in Wheatley, Oxfordshire, England. She is the granddaughter of the physicist and Nobel laureate Max Born, daughter of the pharmacologist Gustav Born and Ann Plowden-Wardlaw, stepdaughter of the American theatre director and writer George Mully, and cousin of the pop singer Olivia Newton-John. She is the partner of social theorist and political geographer Andrew Barry.

Born studied the cello and piano at the Royal College of Music in London, and performed classical and modern music including stints with the Michael Nyman Band, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra and the Flying Lizards. She also studied for a year at the Chelsea School of Art.

In June 1976, she joined the English avant-rock group Henry Cow as bass guitarist and cellist, following the departure of John Greaves. Henry Cow was in a period of intensive touring and Born toured Europe with the group for two years.

After Henry Cow, Born performed and recorded with a number of groups and musicians, including fellow Henry Cow member Lindsay Cooper, National Health, Bruford, and Mike Westbrook, particularly as a cellist in the Westbrook Orchestra. Her playing is prominent on Westbrook's album, The Cortege. Late in 1977, Born, Cooper, Sally Potter and Maggie Nichols founded the Feminist Improvising Group. She also recorded with The Raincoats, and played improvised music with Lol Coxhill, Steve Beresford, David Toop and others as a member of the London Musicians' Collective.

During the 1980s, Born was an occasional member of Derek Bailey's Company, and played cello and bass guitar on numerous soundtracks for television and film for composers Lindsay Cooper and Mike Westbrook, as well as the soundtrack for the Stephen Poliakoff play Caught on a Train (1980). She had a walk-on part in Sally Potter's film The Gold Diggers (1983).

Born studied anthropology at University College London, gaining her BSc in 1982 and her PhD (supervised by Michael Gilsenan and Michael Rowlands) in 1989. Her first academic job (1986-89) was in the Department of Human Sciences at Brunel University, where she assisted Roger Silverstone in setting up the degree in Communication and Information Studies. Born moved to a lectureship in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths' College, London (1989-97), where she worked alongside Dick Hebdige.

In 1997 Born began work for an Assistant Lectureship in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge. In 2000 she was appointed to a Lectureship, in 2003 to Reader in Sociology, Anthropology and Music, and in 2006 to Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Music at Cambridge, a title that recognises her interdisciplinary contributions.

At Cambridge, Born teaches the sociology and anthropology of culture, media, music, and ethnographic method in the Department of Sociology. She is responsible for the only dedicated lecture course on contemporary media in the social sciences.

Born is a member of Cambridge's Screen Media Group, which in 2006 launched Cambridge's first cross-Schools master's degree, Screen Media and Cultures. Born founded and directs the Cambridge Media Research Group which runs a seminar series and related events. In 2005 she organised a conference at Cambridge on the legacy of Laura Mulvey's essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema".

Between 1996 and 1998, Born was a visiting professor in the Institute of Musicology at the University of Aarhus, and from 1997 to 1998 Senior Research Fellow at King's College, Cambridge. From 1998 to 2006 she was Fellow and Director of Studies in Social and Political Sciences at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Born is Honorary Professor of Anthropology at University College London and a Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. She is also a Fellow of the Australian Cultural Sociology Association and of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism.

n 2010 Born was awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council for a major programme of research on the transformation of music by digital media. Subsequently, she moved to become Professor of Music and Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Since 2012, she has also been a Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. In 2014 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy."