Places and identities
Examining how music shapes and expresses place, identity, and culture across local and global contexts.
Places and identities
In Places and identities we examine how music shapes and expresses place, identity, and culture across local and global contexts.
Some of our ongoing and recent projects and groups include:
- Music in the Caribbean
- Jazz, both African-American, European and Global
- Mediterranean musics
- Music and society in North East England
- Shetland, Scotland, England, and America
- Critical approaches to Colonialism and Orientalism
- The medieval and early modern city
- Nature and natural environments
- Gender and sexuality studies
Adam Behr
Reader in Music, Politics and Society
I teach and research the intersections between the creative industries, cultural policy, music, and politics. I'm also interested in the sociology and history of popular music and their relationship to the politics of popular culture.
Following a PhD on the historical context and social dynamics of rock bands at the University of Stirling, I have researched and published on:
- cultural policy
- music and politics
- music and election campaigns
- the music industries
- popular music of the mid-twentieth to twenty first centuries
In addition to academic writing, I've written extensively for the web, as an editor and contributor to the Live Music Exchange site, for The Conversation and elsewhere.
Charlotte Bentley
Lecturer in Music
My research focuses on operatic mobility in the nineteenth century, using the translation of opera into non-European environments as a way of examining questions of international cultural transfer in the period more broadly.
I have explored the New Orleans's place within growing global operatic systems, arguing for the centrality of human agency to the long-term development of transatlantic networks of production, as well as the role of material culture in promoting an increasingly international operatic discourse. At the same time, I have sought to understand the more distinctively local aspects of the city’s operatic life, in terms of the theatre-going experience and the adaptation/reception of particular works.
My other research interests include Jules Massenet, operatic realism, and the influence of media technologies on the production and reception of opera in the late nineteenth century.
Ian Biddle
Professor of Music History
I'm a cultural theorist and musicologist. I work in a range of music and sound-related areas, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries.
My work includes:
- the cultural history of music and masculinity
- theorising music's intervention in communities
- subjectivities, sound, soundscapes and urban experience
- the politics of noise
I'm interested in:
- memory studies
- sound studies
- Italian workerist and autonomist theory
- psychoanalysis and theoretical approaches to 'affective' states
I'm co-founder and co-ordinating editor (with Richard Middleton) of the journal Radical Musicology.
Steph Carter
Research Associate: Music, Heritage, Place
My research focuses on musical culture in early modern England. My published work includes articles on music ownership and circulation, the role of the publisher as music editor, and the sale of printed music outside London.
I have worked on the music print trade, networks and recreational music-making in Cambridge and Newcastle upon Tyne. I co-edited, with Kirsten Gibson and Roz Southey, Music in North-East England, 1500-1800 (Boydell, 2020) and, with Simon D.I. Fleming, The Music Trade in Regional Britain, 1650-1800 (Boydell, 2025).
My current work continues to focus on printed music books in early modern England, placing them within the wider context of the full range of activities that comprise the commercial music trade.
I'm currently researching
- the movement of musical goods via the domestic coastal trade. This is funded by the Bibliographical Society
- evidence of music-making activities in the Duke of Northumberland’s archives at Alnwick Castle. This is funded by the Music & Letters Trust and the Bibliographical Society
- music activities at late 17th-century Carlisle Cathedrals
William Edmondes
Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Performance
William Thomas Gustav Edmondes is the full 'real' name of the artist and performer variously known as Gwilly Edmondez, Gustav Thomas, Copydex, Virginia Pipe and more. As a composer-performer my primary materials are:
- voice
- recorded media
- sampling & sequencing
I also work with 8-bit Techno (Gameboy with Nanoloop), online video and drawing; my primary aesthetic is Wild Pop.
I'm one half of the duo YEAH YOU with Elvin Brandhi; and publish (and posts on his Claws & Tongues page) extra-academic critical musicology and other writings as Gustav Thomas, my middle names and the first names of my grandfathers, which also indicates his background as half-Welsh, half-Slovene.
I teach Contemporary Music Practice at all three stages alongside historical-cultural musicology options on Hip Hop, Jazz, Fringe Cultures and Underground/Experimental Popular Music.
Richard Elliott
Senior Lecturer in Music
I'm a cultural musicologist with a particular interest in popular musics of the world.
My research interests are wide but mostly connect to ways in which music reflects and produces time, space and memorable objects.
My early work explored the roles played by loss, memory, nostalgia and revolution in popular music. This was heavily influenced by theories of place and spatiality.
Another ongoing theme in my work is the various ways in which music creates or evokes ‘memory places’ that take on significance for individuals and communities.
Nancy Kerr Elliott
Lecturer in Folk and Traditional Music
I'm a folk educator with over 25 years’ teaching experience in both formal and informal education settings. I've led workshops and choirs and taught 1:1 at festivals, residential courses, schools and universities in the UK, Australia, Canada, Europe and Asia.
My music psychotherapy background informs my practice as a facilitator of client-led music-making throughout the lifespan.
Subject areas include:
- Creative Practice Research
- Traditions of these Islands
- Folk Ensemble
- Applied Songwriting & Composition (Folk & Modal)
- Folk Music, Gender & Identity
Kirsten Gibson
Head of the School of Arts and Cultures / Professor of Early Modern Music and Culture
My current research focusses on music books in early modern and Georgian England - print and manuscript - but shifts the emphasis from the production of books and authorship towards a history of reading and recreational music making.
My research traces the sale, circulation and ownership of music books from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and seeks to rethink the social and geographical reach of literate recreational music making.
It explores anew well-known socially elite collectors and contexts by placing them in a broader nexus of musical activity, music book ownership and use. It takes account of a broad cast of historical actors and a wide range of spaces that music books inhabited and in which they were realised in sound through acts of ‘reading’ as musical performance.
My research explores the social functions of music books for a variety of amateur musicians who fashioned social identities through the acquisition of:
- musical skills and literacies (textual, notation, tablature)
- engagement in recreational music making, and
- ownership, compilation or creation of music books that supported and signalled such activity
Bennett Hogg
Senior Lecturer
Current Work
- composing music for release with Arts Council of England funded book with Mike Collier, Geoff Sample, and Alex Charrington - also writing a chapter for this book.
- commission for new work for Icelandic early music group Nordic Affect.
- commission for ten-string guitar piece for CD release in 2019 by Stefan Ostersjo.
- co-investigator on "Bee-ing Human", Leverhulme Trust three-year funded interdisciplinary research project on Charles Butler's The Feminine Monarchie. This is a 17th-century book on bees and beekeeping.
- co-investigator (Newcastle University lead) on Sonic Intangibles, a two-year joint UKRI-funded interdisciplinary project exploring data sonification.
- Co-editor of special issue of Seismograf, a Danish music and sound art journal specialising in the innovatory "audio paper" format.
- Director of Landscape Quartet - formerly an AHRC-funded environmental sound art project.
- Curator and producer of sound art and music for Cheeseburn Grange Sculpture Gardens, Stamfordham, Northumberland.
- co-editing with Matthew Sansom a new edited issue of Contemporary Music Review - "Music, Sound, and Landscape" - now in press
Nanette De Jong
Professor of Socially Engaged Ethnomusicology
My work has focussed primarily on Caribbean music, Black American jazz, and African-diasporic identity.
I continue to publish in these areas (most recently as editor of the Cambridge Companion of Caribbean Music); however, after receiving a Fulbright Fellowship to South Africa (in 2006), my research expanded to also include Southern Africa.
Given that region’s high rate of HIV/AIDS and gender-based violence (GBV), my work turned towards matters of health, gender inequality, and music-based advocacy. My most recent research divided between:
Social-engagement pursuits
I act as an ethnomusicologist-consultant for various communities, NGOs, and local organisations in Southern Africa.
Scholarly pursuits
My more recent publications reflect this social-engagement work and is often written in collaboration with members of those communities.
Through the years, I have collaborated with over 180 NGOs (non-government organisations), NPOs (non-profit organisations), and government offices. Together, we have implemented dozens of arts-based interventions, strengthened policy frameworks around health and gender equality, and organised training programmes to prepare women and youths for employment in the cultural sector.
Joe Lockwood
Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow
I'm a music historian with research interests in the 18th century and the broader early modern period. I'm especially interested in the relationship between music, politics, society, religion and culture during this period.
My current work explores the changing ways Handel's music was performed and thought about in the years after his death. Particularly beyond Britain, in locations including Italy, the Caribbean, Austria and India.
As well as performances, criticism, arrangements and translations of Handelian material, I also consider other composers' creative responses to Handel's music.
Rob Mackay
Senior Lecturer in Composition
My main area of research is in electroacoustic composition and sound art.
Recent projects have moved towards a more cross-disciplinary approach, including:
- theatre
- text in performance
- audiovisual installation work
- acoustic ecology, and
- human-computer interaction
My work has gained international recognition in the form of prizes and honours, and my pieces are performed regularly worldwide (including several performances on BBC Radio 3).
Matthew Ord
Lecturer
My research applies a cultural-historical approach to the intersection of ideology and musical practice in British folk and popular music. In 2017 I completed my AHRC-funded PhD thesis which combined ethnographic and desk-based research to explore the cultural significance of sound recording in the British post-war folk revival.
I'm interested in the role of recording and other media technologies in folk music cultures. I've published chapters on the role of recording within the British folk-rock movement, and on the media activism of the songwriter Ewan MacColl.
In December 2017 I was appointed postdoctoral fellow on an AHRC Creative Engagement project on the development of music tourism in Scotland. I am currently preparing articles on contemporary English folk field recordings, and on theories of cultural transmission in folk music historiography. In addition to my research activities, I remain an active musician with significant professional experience as a singer and guitarist in a range of folk and popular styles.
Magnus Williamson
Professor of Early Music
Since the 1990s I have focused on musical sources and contexts of the late Middle Ages, mainly in Britain, but more recently in France as well. I have several ongoing research projects on the soundscape of the pre-Reformation parish, the printing of music books (particularly the often neglected but very significant corpus of printed chant books), and the Chapel Royal under the Tudors.
I've been Principal Investigator on various RCUK-funded projects, including Tudor Partbooks: The manuscript legacies of John Sadler, John Baldwin and their antecedents (Co-I: Dr Julia Craig-McFeely of Oxford University and DIAMM) (AHRC, 2014-17).
I was for some years General Editor of the British Academy series, Early English Church Music (2008-2021) and am now its Chairman.