Musicology 

Durham University’s Department of Music has a distinguished tradition of musicological scholarship stretching back over a century, and today plays host to a productive variety of musicological sub-disciplines and approaches, from the cultural-historical to the analytical, from theatre studies to trauma studies.  Our internationally-renowned musicologists publish widely in leading music and interdisciplinary journals, collaborate with partners around the globe, and win prizes and grants for cutting-edge research; they are also active outside the academy through reconstructing and editing works for performance and recording, giving pre-concert talks and writing programme notes, and working with local ensembles and schools. We have a particular concentration of expertise relating to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on music and musical life in the German-speaking world, France, Japan, Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Empire. We maintain close links with several of the University's interdisciplinary research institutes and centres (including the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, the Centre for Visual Arts and Culture, and the Institute for Medical Humanities) and a number of national and international research networks, amongst them the group of the British Association for Slavonic and Eastern European Studies.   The department regularly hosts major international conferences and workshops, with notable recent events include Trauma Studies in the Medical Humanities (2018); The English Musical Renaissance and the Church (2018); The Nineteenth-Century Archive as a Discourse of Power (2019); and the department will host the Royal Musical Association Annual Conference in 2022.

Postdoctoral and postgraduate scholars are an integral part of the Department, participating in our regular research fora and study groups. We would be delighted to hear from prospective postdoctoral fellows, PhD and Masters students. Collaboration with academics in other departments is possible for PhD supervision and post-doctoral mentoring: we currently have doctoral students working between Music and Theology, and between Music and Modern Languages and Cultures, for example. You can read more about Research Supervision here.