Thomas Hodgson awarded British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship

The Department of Music has recently welcomed Thomas Hodgson to the faculty, where he has begun a 3-year project entitled 'Mirpuris, Islam and Music in Britain'.

The project, funded by a prestigious British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, focuses on the role of music among Mirpuri Muslims in the UK and Pakistan.  Mirpuris represent by far the largest number of Muslims and Pakistanis living in the UK, and yet little is known about their music outside of the community itself.  

Central to the project will be developing an understanding of a genre of traditional sung poetry, called Pothwari Sher, which is commonly found across the Punjab, southern Kashmir and in UK cities where Mirpuris have settled.  Through sustained periods of ethnographic fieldwork across the UK and Pakistan, the project will look at spaces music making, pedagogies, aesthetics, dissemination, inter alia, in order to examine broader process of migration, globalisation and multiculturalism.

In its third year, the project will host a major new international conference on 'Pakistanis, Islam and Music'.

Hodgson joins King's from Oxford, where he recently completed his DPhil.  He is also a practicing musician, touring regularly with British band Stornoway.