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People by theme

There is a wide range of researchers with an interest in music at UCL, across multiple disciplines and Faculties. The Music Futures initiative aims to strengthen and extend this community.

People (listed by themes)

Interaction and Community | Sounds and Spaces | Communication, Education and Health | Music as Art | History and Performance

Interaction and Community

Manuel Arroyo-Kalin - Associate Professor at UCL Institute of Archaeology. Manuel was involved in the organisation of the Music Archaeology of Latin America day conference that took place on 11/2019 at UL Senate House (led by Diane Scullin (Bristol), Henry Stobbart (RHUL), and Bill Sillar (UCL Archaeology)). His research interest in the Amazon basin involves a comparative consideration of indigenous music.

Georgina Born - Professor of Music and Anthropoloy, UCL Anthropology. Georgina is working on a 5-year ERC-funded project: Music and Artificial Intelligence: Building Critical Interdisciplinary Studies.

Tariq Jazeel - Professor of Human Geography and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World. Tariq is currently writing a book on the recent history of British Asian dance music, the so-called ‘Asian Underground’ or ‘New Asian Kool’, 1997-c.2010. 

Sophie Mepham - Coordinator for Sustainable Cities and Transformative Technology, Grand Challenges (currently on secondment to Urban Lab). Sophie plays violin in the Peckham Chamber Orchestra, a community orchestra focused on decolonising classical music set up by Hannah Catherine Jones; whilst working in Palestine, Sophie volunteered with Music Harvest, playing traditional ceilidh music for Dabke dance nights; she worked with Sam Lee (Extinction Rebellion, Music Declares founder) to put on a programme of acoustic folk concerts in outdoor spaces throughout London called "Campfire Club". She is interested in music making for wellbeing and community cohesion, improving access to music, and representation/research that opens up the classical archive.

Caragh Murphy-Collinson - MSc Social and Cultural Anthropology. Caragh is a London-based Archaeologist and Anthropologist whose research currently focuses on the relationships between people and the environment throughout time. Using various experimental forms of 3D environment reconstruction, ethnographic film, and sound design, she strives to produce research that is accessible and engaging, utilising multi-sensory experiences that contribute to institutional decolonisation, and challenge the anthropological status-quo.

Hélène Neveu Kringelbach - Associate Professor of African Anthropology, SELCS. Her study of social mobility in Dakar, as seen through the lives and work of dancers and musicians, was published in 2013 as a prize-winning monograph, Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal. She is currently working on an ethnographic study of binational and transnational families between Senegal and Europe. Her next project will look at music and ideas of home among West African migrants. She teaches anthropology of dance and music.

Thomas Western - Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography. His teaching and research centre on movements and migrations, cities and citizenships, relations and imaginations, activisms and anticolonialisms – working with methods that foreground sound and voice. Tom works primarily in Athens, Greece, where he studies and contributes to migratory activisms and creative citizenship movements. He is a member of the Syrian and Greek Youth Forum (SGYF), with whom he runs the Active Citizens Sound Archive – a space for amplifying citizenship work, youth activism, and collective research and knowledge production. Based on this work, Tom is currently writing a book titled Circular Movements: Migratory Citizenships in Athens. The book hears how people in Athens creatively contest the logics of borders and citizenship regimes, reimagining questions of being and belonging in the city, and remaking citizenships against citizenship.

Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi - Associate Professor (Teaching) of Finnish and Minority Languages, SSEES. Riitta is interested in multilingual metal music (and language pedagogy, Uralic languages, North Sámi, endangered languages, translation studies, song lyrics, and verbal morphology and syntax). He is specifically interested in pop music, heavy metal and hip hop. He has explored the concept of cultural trauma in Estonian heavy metal; what Finnish pop lyrics say about modern Finland, and hip hop as an opportunity for minority arctic languages. 

Sounds and Spaces

Sara Adhitya - Senior Research Fellow, Dept of Civil, Environ &Geomatic Eng. Sara draws on her multidisciplinary background in environmental design, architecture, urbanism, music and sound design, in her interactive and multisensorial approach to urban design. 

Paul Bavister - Architect, Design tutor and Phd Candidate, Bartlett School of Architecture. Paul is interested in sound, music, architecture, biometric sensing, evolutionary optimisation and the generation of emotional response to sound and space.

Andrew Harris - Associate Professor in Urban Studies and Geography, Co-Director UCL Urban Lab. Andrew is very interested in cities, music and sound and has been running Stadtklang, UCL Urban Laboratory's music night and weekend evening get-together exploring urban sound, hosted in collaboration with Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths.

Emma Kate Matthews - Lecturer in Architecture, Bartlett School of Architecture. Emma is concerned with discovering & exploiting creative reciprocities between music as constructed sound, & architecture as constructed space. Has explored reciprocity between music and architecture by composition of site-specific pieces, composed for and performed in specific places. She aims to establish a mode for transdisciplinary practice between the interconnected fields of architecture, acoustical engineering, music composition & performance.

Clare Melhuish - Director and Principal Research Fellow, UCL Urban Laboratory  

Nick Tyler - Chadwick Chair of Civil Engineering, Director of PEARL, Dept of Civil, Environ & Geomatic Eng, Faculty of Engineering Science. As a former professional musician, Nick is interested in how people and environments interact, and in particular how music expresses, encapsulates and elucidates such interactions. I have constructed a research laboratory (PEARL) to explore these issues, where we can create multisensory environments at life-scale and learn how people respond to different situations.

Robin Wilson - Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory, Bartlett School of Architecture. Robin is involved in collaborative, arts-based forms of research in architectural and landscape sites that have involved sound and the composition of sonic scores produced as part of multi-media, site-specific documentary and artistic (he was recently involved in an arts-based research projects collaboration with the composer and sound artist Iain Chambers –'Return to Spatial Futures' – ongoing, in Paris, since 2018 - and 'The Gathering Grounds', a new project on landscape).

Filipa Wunderlich - Lecturer, The Bartlett School of Planning. Filipa is a trained classical musician, architect, and urban designer, and at the Bartlett, my academic work on urban place-design, capitalises from bridging knowledge between urban design and musical aesthetics, bringing forward innovative forms of thinking about design in the city. She specialises on the topic of temporality in urban places, urban rhythms and place-rhythm analysis, and overall the interface between urban and musical aesthetics, with the aim to foster innovative and creative urban design practices.

Communication, Education and Health

Tim Adlam - Associate Professor at Global Disability Innovation, and UCL Interaction Centre. Tim researching technology for disabled children and have an interest in music as non-verbal communication in the context of disability and physical separation. He runs some MSc activity in this space, and is working on a Trellis grant application to look at arts and disability in an East London context. He plays a variety of woodwind.

David Baker - Associate Professor, UCL Culture, Communication & Media; Programme Leader for the Music Education MA and Academic Head of Learning and Teaching. David has worked with Lucy Greenon a new book on visually impaired musicians' lives and learning. 

Rochelle Burgess - Lecturer in Global Health, Institute for Global Health, Faculty of Pop Health Sciences. Rochelle's interests are largely in relationships between music and arts in mental health - with an emphasis on young black people and music's relationship to narratives of change.

Lucy Green - Emerita Professor of Music Education, Institute of Education (IoE). Lucy is interested in the sociology of music and of music education in relation to music, as well as: ideology, meaning, gender, visual impairment, informal learning, innovative pedagogy, self-accompanied singing in classical music. 

Patrick Haggard - Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. Action & Body Group Leader.

Evangelos Himonides - Professor of Technology, Education, and Music, IOE - Culture, Communication & Media. In addition to his work at UCL, Evangelos works closely with Shout at Cancer, a charity supporting the recovery of people who have had laryngectomy, with a focus on music and performance.

  • Himonides, E; Thompson, WF; (2021) Media and technology in music education. In: Thompson, WF and Olsen, KN, (eds.) The Science and Psychology of Music From Mozart at the Office to Beyoncé at the Gym. (pp. 325-330). Greenwood: Santa Barbara, CA.

Monica Lakhanpaul - Professor of Integrated Community Child Health, UCL GOS ICH and Honorary Consultant Paediatrician at NHS Whittington Trust. Her research focuses on working with vulnerable communities and supporting them to make their voices heard to raise awareness and bring about policy changes that benefit all. She has turned to the creative arts as a medium that allows people to express their own perspectives and share their narratives and experiences, so that other can engage with these vulnerable communities’ stories directly.

Deborah Lee - Senior Teaching Fellow in Library and Information Studies, UCL Information Studies. Deborah specialises in knowledge organisation. Her music-related research includes: how music is classified and organised including analysing musicological classifications, and covering types of information such as musical genres, musical forms and medium of performance (eg. which instruments are used). 

Siobhan Morris - Head of Programmes, UCL Grand Challenges of Cultural Understanding and Justice & Equality. Siobhan is interested in music as memorialisation; music and memory (also in relation to misremembering). 

Davide Di Prete - PhD student in Linguistics. Davide runs a Music Phonology Research Group

Ross Purves - Associate Professor of Music Education, IoE. Ross is involved in a wide range of music education-based research. At present, this embraces the exploration of young people’s engagement with musical activity via geospatial analysis, along with interdisciplinary projects exploring the combination of music, coding and Lego construction. He also has an interest in the history of English music education. Recent publications have also included skill acquisition and ethical awareness in music technology.  

Jason Warren - Professor of Neurology, Consultant Neurologist, National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. Jason is a clinical cognitive neurologist and PI at UCL Dementia Research Centre - his lab uses sound and in particular music as a tool to understand the systems pathophysiology of Alzheimer's and other dementias.

Music as Art

Tim Beasley Murray - Associate Professor of European Thought and Culture, Vice-Dean (External Engagement); Director, BA Creative Humanities; Convenor, PhD in Creative Critical Writing; Academic Director, UCL Introductory Programme BASc Arts and Sciences. Tim is interested in art as sound, and anti-musical discourse from Lenin to the Taliban.

David Burrows - Professor of Fine Art, Slade School of Fine Art

Susan Collins - Professor of Fine Art & Head of Research, Slade School of Fine Art

Benedict Drew - Lecturer, Slade School of Fine Arts. Ben has extensive knowledge of art and music, and has taught on: drone, Pauline Oliveros, Elaine Radigue, afrofuturism in music, Pandit Nan Prath and El Dahb as well as running sound making and sonic fictioning sessions. Ben is also very knowledgeable about the history of West Coast synths and related counter-culture. 

Joana Jacob Ramalho – Lecturer (Teaching), SELCS-CMII. Joana is particularly interested in musical moments in film, film musicals, subcultural music styles, musical satire, and the relation between music and memory. She teaches a module on musical satire for the Comparative Literature MA and uses music-based pedagogies to support language learning. Her music-related research includes publications on intermediality and radical humour in the repertoire of British punk cabaret trio The Tiger Lillies and on independent postmillennial gothic musicals.

Timothy Mathews - Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism, SELCS. He is enamoured of art in many forms, and in his creative critical writing explores what relating to art can tell us about relating to people, as well as rhythym in translation. He co-edits various series at UCL Press.

Jayne Parker - Professor of Fine Art, Head of Graduate Fine Art Media, Slade School of Fine Art. Jayne is an artist filmmaker who has made many 16mm films featuring the performance of music, new contemporary and experimental. She is particularly interested in the structure and form of music in relation to the materiality of analogue film, the act of performance and expression of music, as well as the instrument itself. She is interested in the way we experience and encounter music.

Patrick White - Artist and Lecturer (Teaching) in Fine Art Media, Slade School of Fine Art. Patrick has made a number of sound/musical works in the past. He finds sound to be a conceptually distinct and uniquely useful medium. He was also an audio engineer by profession for many years and still does some sound-related technical and practical teaching as well as helping students with more theoretical concerns.

History and Performance

Mataio Austin Dean - Creative Fellow, Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS). Mataio is an artist and activist whose research is concerned with the aesthetics and politics of Marxism and decoloniality, his work often focuses on print culture and its interactions with oral cultures, particularly English folksong.

Michael Berkowitz - Professor of Modern Jewish History, UCL Hebrew & Jewish Studies. Michael has been working on a musical, Man & God, based on the inventors of Kodachrome film, Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, Jr—who were classical musicians, and the children of classical musicians. He has worked on stage performances with musical components in the Bloomsbury Theatre.

Jeff Bowersox - Associate Professor of German History, SELCS. Jeff is tracing African-American stage performers who toured European music halls, concert venues, churches, and variety theatres before the jazz age. He is interested in reconstructing their performances and understanding audiences’ and critics’ responses as they listened, embodied, analysed, appropriated, or rejected various elements of what they encountered. All of these interactions will be situated within a transatlantic dialogue on questions of race, nation, and culture that took place within popular music and dance. 

Will Gibson - Reader in Social Research, Director of the UCL, IOE Academic Writing Centre. Will is a sociologist at the IOE. His research started (many years ago) in the sociology of music, specifically Jazz improvisation, and is an area of study he is returning to now.

Shirli Gilbert - Professor of Modern Jewish History, UCL Hebrew & Jewish Studies. Shirli's book, Music in the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2005) examines the role of music in the Nazi ghettos and camps and the insight it offers into victims' responses. The book was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. It was also the basis for the large-scale educational website Music and the Holocaust, a documentary feature on BBC Radio 3, and concerts at London's Wigmore Hall and the Hampstead Arts Festival.

Paul Gilroy - Professor of The Humanities and Founding Director, Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism. Paul has three PhD students currently working on music. His primary interest in music is how it connects to historical pathologies of English culture. 

Nicolas Gold - Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science. Nicolas is an interdisciplinary computer scientist and musician, with research interests at the intersection of arts, humanities and sciences and particularly in computer music for creative practice, analysis, healthcare, and education. He is interested in new interfaces for musical expression – including a laptop orchestra which previously performed at the UCL Festival of the Arts. Also involved in an EU funded project about music in healthcare, working with IoE on music and making, working with lego, and interested in ethics and musical technology. 

Niccola Hutchinson-Pascal - Head, Co-Production Collective, UCL Culture.

Axel Körner - Honorary Professor, UCL History, and Professor of Modern Cultural and Intellectual History, Leipzig University. Axel has been working on music and opera for the past 30 years (reception of Rossini, Verdi, Beethoven, Meyerbeer in different contexts, and Italian Wagnerism); he serves on the editorial boards of Verdiperspektiven and the Bollettino del Centro Rossiniano di Studi. His recent Leverhulme project looks at the globalization of Italian opera, with a book forthcoming in 2021 (CUP). He received an ERC grant to work on Imperial Politics of Opera in Habsburg Europe, 1815-1914. At Leipzig he is setting up a Centre for cross-disciplinary opera research.

Annika Lindskog - Lecturer in Scandinavian Studies, SELCS. Annika has a particular research interest in music as cultural history, often intertwined with landscape ideologies and cultural memory structures. She developed a cross-disciplinary module on ‘Hearing Cultures’. She is also a Chamber music player, and a singer. 

Ben Noble - Lecturer in Russian Politics, School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Ben is interested in opera.

Nina Quach - Head of Programmes, UCL Grand Challenges of Global Health and Human Wellbeing.  Nina has been playing the piano since childhood and recently took up guitar and ukulele. In addition, she has been teaching, choreographing, and performing Latin dances in student societies and dance schools. Nina is interested in the creative process involved in music writing and interpretation, as well as challenging social dynamics and gendered roles in the dance scene. 

Jennifer Rushworth - Associate Professor, SELCS. Jennifer is working on a book on Proust and song and organising a British Academy conference on 'Song in the Novel' to take place on 30 September/1 October 2021. She sings and plays piano and has worked with Bloomsbury Theatre.

Lisa Sampson - Associate Professor (Early Modern Italian Studies), Director of Italian Studies, SELCS. Lisa researches on early modern Italy, focusing especially on courts and academies which were key settings for some of the most innovative practical and theoretical experimentation with music, theatre and literature in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In particular, she is interested in how female performers (including singers) influenced musical and creative practices (including the rise of opera).  She ran the Virtuosa Singer in the Academies of Early Modern Italy concert with professional musicians/lecture (Sept. 2018).

Matthew J. Smith - Professor and Director of Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, UCL History. Matt is interested in the social history of popular music in Jamaica in the early postcolonial years. 

Ian Scott - Director, UCL Grand Challenges  

Tabitha Tuckett - Rare-Books Librarian, Academic Support and Events, UCL Special Collections. Tabitha is interested in the relation between rare books, manuscripts and documents and their realisation in performance or relevance to performance practice; as a modern and Baroque ‘cellist, she's interested in the relationship between musicians and audiences, particularly in the impact of physical structures and performance spaces on audience members’ personal experience performance. She co-founded an award-winning musical-in-hospitals project in the early 2000s that ran for 8 years, looking at participation as listener, and this interest has continued in exploring the effect of historical buildings, contextualising documents and online performance spaces on the intimacy of the experience of live performance. She also participated as a performer in a research project partly based at UCL looking at women musicians in Early Modern Italian Academies.