About

Much of my work revolves around leadership and collaboration. In 2021 I co-founded (with Yvonne Liao) the Women in Global Music Research and Industry Network (WIGM). This network, initially funded under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 894071, pioneers women’s musical creativity across geographies and through the ages. It facilitates a range of in-person events, most recently Finding a Voice at the University of California, Irvine (2024), alongside online panels and discussion groups. Enquiries for potential collaborations are warmly encouraged.

Over the last decade, I have chaired five international conferences, all promoting inclusive dialogues across performance, scholarship, and public engagement. These include: Schubert as Dramatist (2014), under the auspices of the Oxford International Song Festival (formerly the Oxford Lieder Festival); Clara Schumann (née Wieck) and her World (2019), in association with The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, TORCH; and Women at the Piano 1848–1970 (2023), a collaboration with Illuminations: The Chancellor’s Arts and Culture Initiative and the Humanities Center: Building Intellectual Community at the University of California, Irvine.

My passion for collaboration is the driving force behind my editorial projects. I am the co-/editor of five volumes: In a New Key: Studies of Women Pianists (forthcoming); Global Perspectives on Women Pianists (2026); Clara and Robert Schumann in Context (2026); Clara Schumann Studies (2021), the first in the Cambridge Composer Studies to be devoted to a woman; and Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert (2019).

At the institutional level, I have championed diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as the Undergraduate Admissions Coordinator for the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford (2018–19), as well as through serving on the Athena SWAN Self-Assessment Team at Oxford (2018–20); the Council of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (2019–21); the Schubert Institute United Kingdom (2019–); and the Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Studies Oxford Network (2013–16).

In 2024 I was elected as Chair of the Schubert Institute United Kingdom.

As a writer, I prioritize spaces for reflection and remembrance, both through the subject matter and the experiences that readers may bring to the topics. I have long been fascinated by artistic portrayals of and responses to loss. Yet it was not until the sudden death of my father that the realities of the subject matter hit home. Tropes I had been imagining at a distance – references to the past, evocations of alternate realities – suddenly felt closer to hand than ever before. Loss, I came to appreciate, had heightened my thinking about the impact of death on creative endeavor, and encouraged me to listen again in the gaps between presence and absence, sound and silence.

My monograph The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert (2024) distils my fascination with strangeness in Schubert’s music – from irreconcilable contrasts to intimations of the sublime and the grotesque – vis-à-vis gothic trends in literature and the visual arts. It thus challenges the well-worn notions of Schubert as a happy-go-lucky composer, or a clairvoyant spinning out endless melodies, and repositions his work within prevailing discourses of the time. Just as the gothic prioritizes open-endedness, a blurring of where things begin and close, so this book likewise encourages a blurring of boundaries – new ways of thinking about gothic expression across music and the arts.

I am currently writing about widowhood as a catalyst for women’s musical creativity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This research tilts the pendulum from widowhood as a time of mourning, to a period of renewal and rediscovery, with case studies ranging from Clara Schumann to Amy Beach and Carrie Jacobs-Bond. In doing so, it recenters loss as a vehicle for humanizing music-historical narratives and for locating traces of creativity in unexpected places.

Recent essays include: “Women, Pianos, and Virtuosity” in The Cambridge Companion to Women Composers (2024); “Franz Schubert, Death, and the Gothic” in Schubert’s Piano (2024); and “Diaries and Letters” in The Oxford Handbook of Musical Biography and Life-Writing (forthcoming).

My teaching centers two interrelated principles: nurturing individual voices and embracing “how to think, not what to think”. I encourage students to be rigorous and inquisitive, but above all, to infuse the classroom with kindness and an openness to diverse learning styles and life experiences. My courses address fundamental questions about the human condition: of who we are and how we navigate the world around us.

I have taught across the spectrum of Higher Education: from the inaugural Foundation Year at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (a bridging program for students from underrepresented backgrounds), through undergraduate and postgraduate seminars and supervision at Oxford, Maynooth University, Ireland, and the University of California, Irvine. I am an active mentor, from undergraduate to PhD projects, and welcome enquiries from prospective mentees.

At New York University Abu Dhabi, I teach the following courses:

Core Colloquium: Dreaming

What does it mean to dream? What is a dream? How does the notion of dreaming differ across geographies and cultures? How might dreaming relate to ideas of memory, nostalgia, loss, and renewal? In what ways have writers, artists, and musicians represented dreams in their work? How does dreaming figure in our own lives — how might it connect us to one another, the past, and the world around us? This course adopts a multisensory and multidisciplinary approach, in order to develop a pluralistic understanding of dreaming. It gathers perspectives from anthropology, philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, and psychoanalysis, as well as drawing on theories from literature, music studies, and art history. Theoretical reflections are complemented by practical exploration — of seeing, reading, and hearing dreams in their myriad manifestations.

First-Year Writing Seminar: Loss

Loss is difficult to articulate. It can feel overwhelming, isolating, painful, unsettling — an experience at once emotional and visceral, yet challenging to put into words. It may also encompass the sense of feeling lost, historical erasure, loss of imagined futures, fluctuating identities, loss as something to be mourned and/or celebrated. This First-Year Writing Seminar traces the spectrum of loss across lived experience and humanistic inquiry. What does it mean to write about loss? How might we give voice to that which has been lost? And what might we learn about ourselves through the process? The course explores representations of loss across literature, music, film, and digital platforms, while simultaneously theorizing its myriad forms through related disciplines. It also reflects on the writing process itself as a way of living through and with loss.

Politics of Gender in Global Song

This course explores women’s diverse approaches to song from the nineteenth century to the present day. It takes students on a tripartite journey around the world, with stops in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and North Africa. In what ways have women engaged with song as a vehicle for individual and collective expression? And how might a global approach enrich our understanding of what song can be and do? The course places history, cultural studies, and gender studies in dialogue with practical exploration of women’s voices across styles and genres: from the German Lied, through the Chilean Nueva Canción movement, to iconic singer-songwriters in the Arab world.