Biography
After completing my PhD at King's College London and working for a year at the University of Nottingham, in 2022 I took up a position as a Fellow by Examination (Junior Research Fellow) at Magdalen College, Oxford. During 2024/25, I will be working as a Lecturer in Music at KCL, after which I am due to return to my position at Oxford.
Research Interests and PhD Supervision
- 19th- and 20th-century music
- Music and politics
- Transnational and international history
I am a historical musicologist specialising in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, cultural politics, and institutional history. In the broadest terms, I aim in my work to show how transnational perspectives can deepen our understanding of the relationship between, on the one hand, ideas, practices, and networks pertaining to music, and, on the other, the profound cultural, social, and political transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly as regards geopolitics. My other interests include material culture, childhood studies, and music education.
Teaching
I teach a range of modules about music since 1800 (encompassing both Western art music and popular music), as well as broader courses concerned with theories, methods, and study skills.
I am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA).
Expertise and Public Engagement
Since summer 2023, I have been working with an arts organisation called Music at Oxford and an interdisciplinary team of artists and workshop leaders to develop Let’s Build a Town!, a collaborative music-theatre project for young people aged 8–10.
Selected Publications
- ‘New Music’s “World Brain”: Technocratic Internationalism at the ISCM Festival’, in Sonic Circulations 1900–60: Music, Modernism, and the Politics of Knowledge, ed. Emily MacGregor, Emily I. Dolan, and Arman Schwartz (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming)
- ‘Mimetic Mechanicity: The Iron Foundry and Vernacular Internationalism in the 1930s’, Twentieth-Century Music 21/1 (2024), 74–109 [awarded the RMA’s Jerome Roche Prize 2024]
- ‘Performing Internationalism: The ISCM as a “Musical League of Nations”’, in ‘Round Table: “A Musical League of Nations”?: Music Institutions and the Politics of Internationalism between the Wars’, ed. Sarah Collins, Barbara L. Kelly, and Laura Tunbridge, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 147/2 (2022), 560–71
- Review of Opera in Postwar Venice: Cultural Politics and the Avant-Garde, by Harriet Boyd-Bennett, Opera Quarterly 36/1–2 (2021), 113–20