I welcome email enquiries from potential PhD students in any of my areas of research.
My PhD students are undertaking advanced research that interacts with my interests in a variety of ways. As well as meeting me for individual supervisions, they present their work regularly for discussion and critique in termly seminars that involve all my PhD students. Although their specific research focuses take them in a range of methodological and theoretical directions, there are particularly strong interactions in contemporary continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis, feminism, music analysis, opera and symphonic music, theories of modernism, and music and musical thought in twentieth-century Britain. More information on their research, and their contact details, can be found on their linked department webpages.
Current PhD students
As supervisor
Richard Mecarsel
Gestalt principles from Wagner to 20th century Avant-Garde theatre: the Gesamtkunstwerk as a codified medium
Simeon Smith
Gustav Holst and Religion: Music, Modernism, Dharma
Aletheia Woodhouse
Power, privilege, patriarchy and politics in twentieth-century Britain: the music of Elisabeth Lutyens and Elizabeth Maconchy
Former PhD students
As supervisor
Oliver Chandler
Edward Elgar’s utopias
Rebecca Day
Philosophical, analytical, and psychoanalytic conceptions of subjectivity in Mahler’s musical modernism
Annika Forkert
The philosophy of musical modernism in Britain and Europe
William Fourie
Topological approaches to music in post-apartheid South Africa
Michael Graham
Shakespeare and twentieth-century British opera
Christopher Kimbell
Place and German identity in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
John Ling
Ethics and aesthetics in musical debates in England, 1888–1907
Rachel McCarthy
Music, musicology, and anti-capitalism in the twenty-first century
Nathan Mercieca
The philosophy and ethics of writing about music
Sarah Moynihan
Analytical conceptions of modernism in late Sibelius
Christopher Tarrant
Analytical, hermeneutic, and philosophical study of Schubert’s chamber music for strings
Jessica Williams
Opera and myth in twentieth-century British music
As advisor
Jane Angell
Corissa Gould
Emer Hopkins
Jonathan Lewis
James Olsen
Jeffrey Warren