Research
Most of my published research examines music’s role in the cultural history of childhood, specifically in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Parisian contexts. This period spans the transition between two intellectual paradigms underpinning the last two centuries of European culture: ‘Romantic childhood’ and (Freudian) psychoanalysis. The musical preoccupation with childhood in turn-of-the-century France tells the story of that transition, I think, with particular clarity.
My other research interest is in philosophical questions about dance and embodiment, exploring the concerns of contemporary fields such as embodied cognition through historical material. I am developing a project that rethinks the choreomusical innovations in early twentieth-century French dance as staging forms of embodied consciousness. A forthcoming volume co-edited with two art historians brings musicological and art-historical approaches to ‘gesture’ into dialogue with broader humanities thinking on the topic. The book tries to formalize a category—misidentification—that questions the logics of communicative transparency which still inform much writing about the body.
In recent years, I’ve undertaken several data-gathering projects about casualized work in Oxford’s tutorial system, both through formal employment by the university and collaboration with casualized colleagues. I’m very happy to discuss these issues with anyone who shares the aim of both preserving our fantastic teaching system and paying properly all the people on whom it depends.
Teaching
I teach the Analysis papers and the methodologies papers (Foundations in the Study of Music, Musical Thought and Scholarship) to all year groups. My assignments in the latter include an emphasis on musicology’s attempts to account for the embodied experience of music, in line with my research interests. I have also taught various Topics courses for both Prelims and FHS on repertoires from the nineteenth century to the present day.
Selected publications
Books
- Misidentification: The Gestural in Twentieth-Century Art and Music, co-edited with Jennifer Johnson and Rachel Coombes (Brill, accepted for publication)
- Children’s Music in Nineteenth-Century Europe, co-edited with Roe-Min Kok (Brepols, 2027)
- Interior Wildness: Music and the Idea of Childhood in Parisian Culture, 1870-1925 [Cambridge University Press, in preparation]
Selected articles and chapters
- ‘Logics of “the Gestural”—Affective, Philosophical, Political’, with Jennifer Johnson and Rachel Coombes, in Misidentification: The Gestural in Twentieth-Century Art and Music (Brill, accepted for publication)
- ‘Valentine de Saint-Point’s Anempathic Dance’, in Misidentification: The Gestural in Twentieth-Century Art and Music (Brill, accepted for publication)
- ‘Children, Childhood and Nineteenth-Century Music’, with Roe-Min Kok, in Children’s Music in Nineteenth-Century Europe, co-edited with Roe-Min Kok (Brepols, 2027)
- ‘Doll-Children: Musical Commodifications of Girlhood in Late Nineteenth-Century Pièces enfantines’, in Children’s Music in Nineteenth-Century Europe, co-edited with Roe-Min Kok (Brepols, 2027)
- ‘Debussy’s Pelléas and Symbolist Childhood’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 79/2 (2026), 339-387
- ‘Enter Children, with Childhood’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 148/1 (2023), 171-9
- ‘(Trans)National Fairy Tale and Romantic Childhood: Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel through its Parisian Reception’, Cambridge Opera Journal 33/1-2 (2022), 1-21
- ‘The Mysterious Souls of Hellé and Debussy’s Toys’, Music & Letters 102/1 (2021), 80-100
- ‘Auden’s imaginary song’, in Delia da Sousa Correa (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 601-8
- ‘The Nursery as Circus: Dancing the Childlike to Fauré’s Dolly Suite, 1913’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 142/2 (2017), 277-325
Other publications
- ‘Casualised Tutorial Teaching: Some Data at Last’, Oxford Magazine 458 (MT 2023), 12-14.
- Beyond HESA: Pay and Working Conditions For Casualised Staff in Oxford Colleges and the Department for Continuing Education (University of Oxford UCU, October 2023).