Graduate study and postdoc mentoring

Graduate Study and Postdoc Mentoring

Graduate Study

A siren points to the cadential formula in the office for Saint Cecilia. Vendôme, Bibliothèque Municipale 0017E, f. 527v.

I am interested in supervising projects on late-medieval music, basically in the period c.1200-c.1380. I will be most interested in your project (and particularly useful to you as a supervisor) if you want to work on anything involving any combination of the following: songs, motets, intertextual issues, broad cultural issues, court culture, music analysis, gender and sexuality studies, nature and animals, French literature, historiography, the ontology of music, Chaucer. If you have only vague ideas for a project in this area, I might be able to suggest something that would build on your interests and skills — just get in touch by email.

Ideal students should be willing to learn to read in modern German and an appropriate medieval language, willing to examine medieval manuscripts, and willing to engage with a spectrum of issues from the minutiae of musical details and the broadest of critical approaches. If you are interested in an academic career after your graduate work, I will offer you assistance with professional development, including the delivery of conference papers and job talks, IT and digital humanities use, and teaching.

I run a grad and postdoc ‘reading group’ which meets three times a term and during the summer as a form of group supervision, focussing on career development, training, and the discussion of recent work in the field by members of the group and others. This group is only open to my students and postdocs and seeks to provide a safe and productive space for intellectual development and discussion. My current and recent students and postdocs are listed here. Please feel free to get in touch with them for the unvarnished account of what it’s like working with me!

I am also interested in students coming for shorter periods from the home institutions as part of international exchange projects. Just get in touch.

Current doctoral students (4)

As supervisor:

from 2017. Jacob Mariani: A”n unstopped string: bowed instruments in medieval Italy”.

As co-supervisor:

from 2020. Elizabeth Cullinane (co-supervised with Professor Helen Swift, Modern Languages): Manuscript Culture of the Capetian Adultery Scandal: Women’s Patronage and Audience
from 2019. George Haggett (co-supervised with Professor Laura Tunbridge, Music): Medievalism in Contemporary Opera
from 2019. Lachlan Hughes (co-supervised with Professor Francesca Southerden, Modern Languages): Musico-poetic syncretism and the lyric context of Dante’s Commedia.

Former doctoral students with completion dates (7)

2018. Marc Lewon (as advisor; supervisor: Reinhard Strohm): ‘Transformational practices in fifteenth-century German music’. Prof. Dr. Lewon is now Dozent für Plektrumlaute und mittelalterliche Zupfinstrumente, Musikgeschichte, Instrumentenkunde (Mittelalter-Renaissance) at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, Switzerland.
2017. Joseph W. Mason: ‘Melodic exchange and musical violence in the thirteenth-century jeu-parti’. (see postdocs, below).
2017. Henry Drummond: ‘Accommodating Poetic, Linear Narratives with Cyclical Repetition-Based Musical Poetic Structures in the Cantigas de Santa Maria’. Dr Drummond has a four-year postdoc at the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, funded by the Strategic Basic Research Scheme of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-SBO).
2017. Meghan Quinlan: ‘Contextualising the Contrafacta of Trouvère Song’. Dr Quinlan has a three-year postdoc at the University of Uppsala, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences) to work on her project ‘Musica Mapped and Unmapped’.
2016. Matthew P. Thomson: ‘Interaction between Polyphonic Motets and Monophonic Songs in the Thirteenth Century’. Dr Thomson is now the Fitzjames Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford.
2013. Henry Hope: ‘Constructing the Minnesänger musically’. Having been a postdoc in Musicology in Bern, Switzerland, Dr Hope is now training to be a priest.
2013. Christopher Garrard (as advisor for critical theory work; supervisor: Martyn Harry): Composition.

Postdoc mentoring

I am delighted to mentor, whether formally (if funded by an external funding body) or informally (if in association with a College JRF), any early career researchers in early music and methodologically related fields who have postdoctoral appointments in Oxford. If you would like to explore the possibilities for postdoctoral research work in Oxford, please get in touch with me or with one of my current or former postdocs.

Current postdocs (5):

from June 2022–2024. Alexandre Cerveux. Dr Cerveux holds a Newton Fellowship at Oxford and, from October 2022, a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College. Dr Cerveux is working on ‘The function of music in the acquisition of knowledge according to medieval Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic philosophical texts’. Here him discuss his prize-winning thesis here [in French].
from 2020. Alice Little, Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and Research Associate at the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments. Dr Little continues to work on the Anthony Baines archive in the Bate Collection and has a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship at TORCH in partnership with the English Folk Dance and Song Society to work on historical sources in their archives.
from 2020. Emanuela Vai, Junior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. Dr Vai continues her work on art, liturgy, and music in the early-modern Venetian Republic, and is part of the (En)coding Heritage Project at TORCH, where she is exploring the application of 3D imaging and printing to cultural heritage research.
from 2021, Brianne Dolce, Fitzjames Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. Dr Dolce is working on the interactions between musical and religious culture, particularly in its dissident or heretical manifestations, in medieval Europe between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, with a focus on the contributions made by women. She will be finishing a book entitled Alternative Orthodoxies: Religious Culture and the Vernacular Arts in Medieval Arras and starting on another, tentatively entitled Voicing Dissent.
from 2021. Joseph W. Mason, Junior Research Fellow at New College, Oxford. Dr Mason has a blog with recordings here. He will be finishing a monograph on music and violence that encompasses crusade songs, the jeu-parti, pastourelles, and theorizations of love as a kind of war.