Skip to main content

Staff Profile

Professor Kirsten Gibson

Head of the School of Arts and Cultures / Professor of Early Modern Music and Culture

Background

Background

I read music at Newcastle University, graduating in 2000 and winning the David Barlow Best Finalist Prize, and completed an AHRB-funded PhD in 2006 on John Dowland’s printed ayres supervised by Prof. Ian Biddle and Prof. Magnus Williamson. My research focuses on music in early modern and eighteenth-century England, placing it in broader cultural contexts through explorations of poetry, politics, print, authorship, gender, status, book history and the history of reading.

My teaching, research and postdoctoral supervision covers musical culture in England from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

For the past decade I've been a regular contributor to BBC Radio 3's Record Review and have also appeared Opera on 3, BBC Proms commentary, and The Essay.

Qualifications

  • BA (Hons), First Class
  • MLitt, with Distinction
  • PhD ('John Dowland's Printed Ayres: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts'), AHRB-Funded (now AHRC)
  • CASAP (Certificate of Advanced Studies in Academic Practice)

 


Research

Research Interests

My work situates music in wider cultural, social and political contexts, and my research interests include:

  • music, gender and social class in early modern and Georgian England;
  • the sale and circulation of printed music in the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries;
  • the social and geographical spread of recreational music making;
  • material histories of musical culture;
  • vernacular musical culture;
  • and recovering evidence for musical life in the English regions, with a particular focus on Northern England.

My methodologies draw on archival research, close readings of musical and textual primary materials, and drawing widely on approaches from outside the field of musicology – particularly from literature studies, gender studies and book and print history. My work seeks to challenge traditional narratives of music history, to bring early modern and Georgian musical culture into conversation with broader cultural histories, and to establish new perspectives on English music from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. 


Current Work

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.


Music, Heritage, Place

I am a Co-Investigator of the AHRC-Funded 'Music, Heritage, Place' project, led by Professor Stephen Rose at Royal Holloway, University of London. This project is uncovering and investigating the music manuscripts and printed music from c.1550 to c.1850 held in local archives across England. It is documenting these sources by creating catalogue records within the database Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) and within the Cecilia database run by IAML UK (International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres). 


'Music, Heritage, Place' is the focus of 'The Song Detectorists' on BBC Radio 3's The Essay. Listen here.


Postgraduate Supervision and Postdoctoral Mentoring

I supervise Masters and doctoral research, and mentor postdoctoral fellowships, on various aspects of music in early modern and Georgian England, and particularly welcome enquiries to work on any of the research areas outlined above. I have supervised Marie Curie and Leverhulme postdoctoral fellowships.


Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

MUS2051: Case Studies in Early Music (Module Leader)

MUS3088: Folk Music, Gender and Identity (Contributor)

Major and Minor Specialist Study Dissertations and Projects (Module Leader)


Postgraduate Teaching

Cultural Histories of Music


Publications