Alexander Douglas

As a ‘a humanities geek in the body of a musician’, Alexander’s professional involvement in higher education stretches back to the late nineties. For most of this time he has been a guest lecturer and workshop tutor in universities and music colleges across the UK (with occasional visits abroad to institutions in the US, Continental Europe and Africa) and sacred music traditions of the Black Atlantic have collectively been the thread that has undergirded – and continues to undergird – his entire academic career. He has also held visiting teaching/supervision posts at the Universities of York, Cambridge, Royal Holloway, Oxford (some of which affiliations continue) and the London School of Theology and is a returning guest lecturer at the University of Leeds. He also holds teaching posts at other HEIs including the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance (where he is Senior Lecturer in Music and Applied Humanities whilst also directing instrumental and choral projects across several genres). He is an Associate Editor for History of Anthropology Review and he sits on the Editorial Board for Contemporary Music Review. And in June 2023 Alexander was elected by the Society for the Study of Theology as their Assistant Secretary for Theology and Race.

Alexander is also very active in an intersectional vanguard that involves HPSM (history and philosophy of science and medicine), the critical medical humanities and arts and health. Having been given an opportunity to lead an antiracism project as the fixed-term Antiracism Facilitator for the Society for the Social History of Medicine, Alexander’s research priorities shifted very drastically. Alongside Chris Millard of Sheffield University, Alexander currently leads Pain and b/Black Identity: Race in Medicine – a new research network funded by the Wellcome Trust through the Northern Network for the Medical Humanities, and he will also be working on a collaborative arts-and-health-humanities project with the University of Wrexham and Ty Pawb on engaging multicultural communities with cultural institutions. Alexander is proud to have been part of the inaugural Artists Represent Recovery Network (2023) during which he undertook a short placement at the Maudsley Hospital and continues to work on developing culturally literate and technically-informed non-clinical arts-and-health interventions. He is also very interested in the EDI issues that currently obtain across teaching/training, research and practice in the BAMT-led British music therapy guild.

An award-winning (but now somewhat retired) jazz pianist and one of the pre-eminent gospel choral directors in the UK, Alexander studied choral conducting with Simon Halsey, Adrian Partington and Neil Ferris He is working on his jazz clarinet playing whilst writing and arranging choral and instrumental music that brings gospel music into constructive dialogue with classical music and jazz. He is the EDI Lead and Chair of the EDI Working Group for the Royal Musical Association Music Philosophy Study Group and maintains an very active interested in the decolonisation of both ‘Kantian’ critique and performance practice in so-called ‘early music’ (in a Western sense of this rubric), not least the sacred music of J.S. Bach and his contemporaries.

Research interests and PhD supervision

Alexander’s work at KCL primarily focusses on the philosophy and anthropology of music with more than a passing interest in the psychology (and more recently, cognitive neuroscience) of music. His research identity began with music and theology before expanding to multiple issues constellating around philosophical and theological anthropology, aesthetics, epistemology, ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ phenomenology, the critical medical humanities, sociology of religion and race. Hermeneutics is also part of both his teaching and research oeuvres and undergirds his commitment to anticolonial and antiracist meaning-making and world-building.

• Aesthetics & Neuroaesthetics
• Phenomenology ('pure' and 'applied', including phenomenological psychopathology)
• African-Diasporic Music/s
• Anthropology (cultural, linguistic, philosophical and psychiatric)
• Theology (and Sociology of Religion)
• Critical and Cultural Theory/ies
• Improvisation and Performance
• Decolonising Baroque Music
• Philosophies of Mind and Language
• Epistemology & Hermeneutics
• Critical Medical Humanities
• Anticolonialism (including both postcolonial and decolonial perspectives)

Teaching

Unsurprisingly given his role as EDI Lead for the Department of Music, Alexander’s UG and MMus teaching/supervision practice is undergirded by anticolonial and antiracist epistemic motivations. A specialist in multiple musics of the Black Atlantic with significant interests in sacred and secular music of the Jews, musical aesthetics, philosophy of music more broadly, theoretical ethnomusicology, ‘sound epistemologies’ within sociology of religion and more, his courses are framed by bespoke ‘philosophical anthropologies’ for each musical area being investigated by which means students engage in questioning what music means to different people in different places at different times, but how different ways of being human also mean different ways of being musical (and as such, strongly resisting Western-centric and logocentric approaches to music whilst not disavowing either the Western art music canon or all Western methods/methodologies completely by any means).

Expertise and public engagement

Alexander is a very experienced facilitator and public speaker. In the past he has made several appearances on BBC Radio as an interviewee in his own right as well as presenting the Daily Service on BBC Radio 4 and served as Music Director for several religious broadcasts. During the 2016 BBC Proms he was specially invited to appear on the BBC World Service alongside Sarah Walker on a special broadcast featuring British gospel music. He has consulted to several cultural organisations including the National Maritime Museum during their 2007 abolition bicentennial commemorations. As an Associate of NHS Research and Development NW he has worked with health researchers on projects centring around communication, creativity and community. He is a longstanding proponent of outreach and engagement work in the arts and cultural sectors, one example being his work as an advocate for ‘differently-abled’ rail network users.

Selected publications

Alexander Douglas' webpage