News
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Appointed
The Faculty of Music is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr Benedict Taylor to the Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Psychology of Music and Music Theory,
sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the OUP-John Fell Fund.
Educated at St Catharine's College Cambridge and King's College London, Benedict Taylor wrote his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge on the topic of Mendelssohn's instrumental music. During his time as a doctoral candidate, he spent a year as an exchange student at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, and a year as a visiting Proctor Fellow at Princeton University. Since completing his doctorate, he has undertaken some teaching at King's London, and has held post-doctoral research positions at University College Dublin and (currently) at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin.
Benedict's book, Mendelssohn, Time and Memory, is to be published later this year by Cambridge University Press. He has also published articles in such prestigious journals as the Journal of Musicology, 19th-Century Music, Musical Quarterly, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, and Music Theory Spectrum, as well as chapters in such volumes as Mendelssohn Perspectives, Messiaen: the Centenary Papers, and The Cambridge Companion to Gilbert and Sullivan.
During the period of his Fellowship, Benedict will be exploring the harmonic usage of late 19th-century composers outside or on the periphery of the Austro-German tradition. It will extend recent work in neo-Riemannian theory and on the geometries of tonality into wider cultural issues pertaining to nationalist discourses and historiography. His particular focus will be the music of Grieg.
Dr Taylor has been elected to a Non-Stipendiary Senior Research Fellowship at New College for three years from 1 October to co-incide with his appointment as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Psychology of Music and Music Theory.