Postgraduate Research Supervisors

Postgraduate Research Programme Leader

Amy is open to proposals for creative and innovative performance-centred research along the spectrum from musicology to artistic research, on topics including: live versus recording studio performance practices; ethnographic approaches to studying classical music-making; collaborative and experimental performance and working practices; and recordings as evidence of past performance practice. 

Postgraduate Research Programme Leader

Dr Simon Bayly works broadly in the fields of theatre and live art and is open to supervising projects these broad areas, including: participatory art practices; art and ecology; the material and social architectures of performance and place; the psychodynamics of groups and organizations; intersections of performance, philosophy and psychoanalysis. 

Graduate Research Training and Development Leader

Biranda’s research interests are in the areas of intercultural pedagogy and institutional discourse. She welcomes PG research applications from teachers who are genuinely interested in discovering something new about their practice. 

Head of Research

Cormac's research primarily addresses nineteenth-century French and Italian opera and literature. He welcomes projects in the fields of nineteenth-century French and Italian opera, music in literature, film music and cultural transfer, adaptation studies, reception studies. 

Design Lecturer

I am particularly interested in supervising practice-as-research projects that are experimental and interdisciplinary, touching on performance, live art, visual art, autoethnography, scenography.

Head of Composition

Julian Philips works in operatic, concert, dance and theatre settings, exploring cross-art dialogues, whether with text, movement or image; his practice is informed by a heightened concern for specific social and performing contexts. He welcomes projects that explore cross-art dialogues, new opera development, the theatricalisation of concert performance, and community/education environments for contemporary composition

Head of Centre of Creative Performance & Classical Improvisation

David welcomes enquiries related to classical improvisation, particularly the following: creativity in performance, state of flow and improvisational state of mind, fusing spontaneity and structural awareness in real-time, expression and its communication in music-making, active listening, mind-reading, and empathy in music-making. 

Deputy Head of Music Therapy

I am a music therapist in adult mental health and a music therapy trainer. My PhD was in music therapy pedagogy and multiple musicianships. I am interested in music therapy/music and mental health/wellbeing, higher music education across disciplines, and in critical discourse methods of research.

Professor of Piano

Maria welcomes projects in the field of piano and pianism, practice-as-research, art song, cultural history and artistic practices, 19th century to 1990 Russian and Soviet Empires, Post-Soviet cultural legacies (various geographies), music and displacement (emigre music, music and space, music and cultural memory), fin de siecle artistic collaborations, aesthetics/philosophy and music performance, music performance and composition as (auto)biographical practice, women performers, composers, memoirists, arrangers and chroniclers. 

Acting Associate Head of Composition (BMus)

Matt welcomes doctoral supervisees for DMus/PhD topics related to any of his research and/or compositional interests: Composition practice research, music and narrative (post 1900), topic theory, adaptation theory, musical analysis, Jazz (particularly 1950-1970).

Acting Head of Composition

Paul Newland is a composer primarily of acoustic concert music but has also collaborated on a number of dance works. His research interest include: materiality, temporality, incompleteness, liminality and the in-between, fragmentation, fragility and continuity, the infrathin, colour, extreme quietness, audibility, “close listening” or “listening in”, field recordings, noise, music as environment/environment as music, presence, immersion, slowing/slowness/stretching/blurring, surface, repetition, self-similarity, extended duration, superimposition/covering/layering, dance, Japanese culture and aesthetics, improvisation, electric guitar, conceptualism, Richard Morris, the Beats, Josef and Anni Albers, slow cinema.

Tutor in Music Philosophy and Aesthetics

My research uses cultural and critical theories to think about contemporary music and sound art in a changing society. Among other areas, I enjoy working with postgraduate researchers interested in music’s relation to questions of philosophy, materiality, and meaning.

Professor of Composition

I am a librettist interested in research projects which are exploring the relationship between words and music, specifically, but not exclusively, opera libretto. I also have a related interest in operetta, oratorio and the history of song, from folk-song to music theatre. 

Academic Studies Tutor

Steve's research interests include music composition and politics; rap, hip-hop, dada, punk, activism, anti-art; critical theory; composition informed by theory; naive music; opera, spoken word, music with textual and/or theatrical components; free jazz; improvisers orchestras, conduction, cross-cultural collaboration, protest music, outsider music; the avant-garde (African, Asian, American, European) and ideology; Gamelan; noise musics; Nietzsche, Adorno, Gilroy, Marx, Foucault; alternative institutions, aesthetic strategies of resistance; wabi-sabi; composition engaged with popular culture, science fiction, utopias, heterotopias.

I’m interested in the following research areas: composition, experimental music, materiality of sound, fragility, decay, collaboration, temporality, open forms, indeterminacy, notation, timbre, prepared instruments, the creative process.

Professor of Composition; Temporary Programme Leader, MA in Opera

Toby is a specialist in vocal and electronic composition, whose work draws on practice-led research, musicology, philosophy, and cultural sociology to examine hybrid and ‘messy' spaces between genres and practices. He also has research interests in music and theatre, socially-engaged composition (including community projects and healthcare), the philosophy of performance, queer music-making, and electronic dance music.