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, manuscripts, 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 their home institutions as part of international exchange projects. Just get in touch.

Current doctoral students (3)

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 2022. Johanna-Pauline Thöne (co-supervised with Professor Catherine A. Bradley, University of Oslo): ‘Papal Polyphony during the Great Western Schism (1378–1417)’.
during 2023-24 as a recognized student at the University of Oxford. Philip Wetzler (supervised by Dr Michael Klaper, University of Jena): ‘Die Musik des Sangspruchs (The music of the Sangspruch)’.

Former doctoral students with completion dates (10)

2023. George Haggett (co-supervised with Professor Laura Tunbridge, Music): ‘Medievalism in Contemporary Opera’.
2023. Lachlan Hughes (co-supervised with Professor Francesca Southerden, Modern Languages): ‘Vernacular Song in Dante’s Florence’.
2022. Jacob Mariani: ‘An unstopped string: bowed instruments in medieval Italy’.
2018. Marc Lewon (as advisor; supervisor: Reinhard Strohm): ‘Transformational practices in fifteenth-century German music’.
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’. Following a four-year postdoc at the KU Leuven, Dr Drummond now has a three-year FWO Senior Postdoc (also at the KU Leuven) to work on his own project, ‘Jesuit Musical Inheritance in the Spanish Netherlands and United Provinces (1540–1648)’.
2017. Meghan Quinlan: ‘Contextualising the Contrafacta of Trouvère Song’. Dr Quinlan has a postdoc at the University of Uppsala.
2016. Matthew P. Thomson: ‘Interaction between Polyphonic Motets and Monophonic Songs in the Thirteenth Century’ (see former postdocs, below).
2013. Henry Hope: ‘Constructing the Minnesänger musically’. Dr Hope is now a priest at Hexham Abbey.
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 (2):

from June 2022 to June 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’. Hear him discuss his prize-winning thesis here [in French].
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.

Former postdocs (9):

2021–2023. Brianne Dolce is now working at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, where she is concerned with Higher Education Policy.
2020–2023. Alice Little continues to work on the Anthony Baines archive in the Bate Collection.
2020–2022. Emanuela Vai continues her work on art, liturgy, and music in the early-modern Venetian Republic, and is now the Manager of the Bate Collection at the Music Faculty, University of Oxford.
2016–2021. Matthew P. Thomson. Dr Thomson is now Stipendiary Lecturer at Merton College, Oxford.
2015-2017. Mikhail Lopatin, was a BA/RS Newton Postdoctoral Fellow at St Hugh’s College. He won the Westrup prize in 2019 for his article on metapoesis in trecento song.
2014-2016: Eleanor Giraud was Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College and is now Lecturer in Ritual Chant and Song at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick, Ireland.
2010-2017. Katherine Butler was BA Postdoctoral Fellow and then Research Assistant on the AHRC funded project, Tudor Partbooks (see her research blog: Early Modern English Music). Dr Butler is now Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Northumbria, Newcastle, UK.
2010-2013: Catherine A. Bradley was a Junior Research Fellow at Queen’s College, Oxford and is Professor of Music at the University of Oslo, Norway, where she is running the ERC project BENEDICAMUS (2020-2026).
2009-2012: Matthew Cheung Salisbury was a Research Assisant for DIAMM. Rev. Dr Salisbury is now Lecturer in Music at University College, Oxford, UK and a priest at St Barnabas, Oxford .