News
Moving In, Moving On
A number of our Faculty's postdoctoral students are moving on to new positions, and a number of new postdocs will be arriving in the Autumn. Congratulations to them all. Follow some of their news here:
Nick Attfield wrote a DPhil at Oxford on the reception of Bruckner's symphonies, and was subsequently British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at St Catherine's College and Lecturer in Music at Worcester College. From September he is taking up a post as Teaching Fellow in Music at the University of Edinburgh.
Katherine Butler will take up a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Faculty of Music in Oxford in October 2011 and will be a member of the SCR at St John's College. Her PhD was a study of the role of music in Elizabethan court culture; her postdoctoral project – provisionally entitled ‘Musical Myths and the Ideas of Music in England 1500-1700’ – will examine the musical stories that informed the uses and beliefs held about music in this period. Myths and other cultural stories provided paradigms of exemplary musicians and explanatory stories for music’s power, origins and social conventions. They were cited as authorities in debates on the morality of music and to justify changes in music’s techniques and purposes. The period 1500–1700 traverses the religious, social, intellectual and artistic upheavals that many scholars have identified as crucial to the birth of modernity, as well as the stylistic change that musicologists perceive between the so-called Renaissance and Baroque. A thorough examination of these myths will further understanding of the changing musical discourses throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Using diverse sources – ranging from musical treatises, through conduct books and the discussions of the Royal Society, to drama, poetry and song – this research will examine how musical myths were used and understood in both popular and elite cultures. Additionally it will show how such myths were reinterpreted or reinvented through the creation of new tales as cultural attitudes to music shifted. As the first study of early modern music to combine musicological, historical and anthropological approaches, this project offers new methods of understanding English music of 1500-1700.
Jo Hicks (DPhil candidate, New College) is, as of Trinity Term 2011, the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College. Jo writes: 'As many at Lincoln have pointed out, I am the first Music Fellow at the College since Egon Wellesz, the composer and scholar of Byzantine music who was taught by no lesser figures than Arnold Schoenberg and Guido Adler. In an attempt to live up to this daunting precedent, I shall be researching street music and its cultural resonances in Paris c. 1880-1930, a topic that grew out of my doctoral project on music and urban geography in Erik Satie's Paris.'
Katerina Levidou, currently JRF at Christ Church, has been appointed to a one-year Swiss Government Fellowship at the University of Lausanne. She will be working on a project centred on the music of the Russian composer Ivan Alexandrovich Vyschnegradsky.
Anna Stirr, currently Mellow Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethnomusicology in the Music Faculty, is moving on to two positions. The first is a postdoctoral fellowship for the Autumn term at Leiden University (Leiden Institute of Asian Studies), on the research theme of Asian Modernities and Traditions. Anna will be working there on her book manuscript entitled Singing Across Divides: Music and Intimacy in Migrant Nepal. In January 2012 she starts a tenure-track job as an Assistant Professor of Asian Performing Arts at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.
Benedict Taylor is to take up the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Psychology of Music and Music Theory in the Music Faculty. Click here to read the earlier story about this appointment. Dr Taylor has also been elected to a Non-Stipendiary Senior Research Fellowship at New College for three years from 1 October to co-incide with his appointment.
From Autumn 2011, Joshua Walden (currently JRF at Merton) will hold an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. He will begin work on a new project titled 'Music and Diaspora Identity on the Yiddish Stage', about the music of Yiddish art theatre and operetta in Eastern Europe and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He will also complete work as editor of the collected volume Representation and Western Music for Cambridge University Press, based on the international conference held at Merton College in March 2010. He will teach courses at the Peabody Institute and the Johns Hopkins Program in Jewish Studies.
Ben Winters, who has for the past two years been Lecturer in Music at Christ Church, has been appointed to a permanent Lectureship in Music with the Open University.