Dr Gavin Williams

Biography

I have worked as a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, and as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at KCL. From 2019, I was employed as a lecturer in music at the University of California, Berkeley, and, from 2022, I am very glad to be back at King's as a part-time lecturer in music, focusing on academic education.

Research Interests

• 19th- and 20th-century music
• Sound studies and histories of listening
• Environmental humanities.

I welcome conversations with PhD and MMus students in the areas listed above. I have particular expertise on the history of recorded music, nineteenth-century wartime, and Italian modernity, while my current research addresses the sounds of the South Wales coalfield. I'm happy to consider supervising theses in broadly related areas, and always willing to discuss research strategies with students, no matter the topic, so please get in touch.

Selected publications

• Music, Format, Friction: Perspectives on the Shellac Disc (forthcoming with University of Chicago Press).
• ‘Shellac as Musical Plastic’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 74/3 (2021), 463–500.
• ‘The Reproduction of Caruso,’ Cambridge Opera Journal 33/1-2 (2022), 161-179.
• Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense (Oxford University Press, 2019), winner of the Royal Musical Association/Cambridge University Press Prize for Outstanding Edited Collection 2020.

Teaching

I have taught a range of courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, including popular music and media. At the postgraduate level, I have helped introduce students to contemporary directions in the field of musicology, as well as designing courses related to my research on music, sound recording and the environment. At KCL, I will be teaching a range of undergraduate modules on music and the moving image, sonic urbanism, and nineteenth-century music.