Joe Davies is a faculty member in the Division of Arts & Humanities at New York University Abu Dhabi. He previously taught at Maynooth University, Ireland, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Oxford (where he completed his doctorate). His work has been funded the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Irish Research Council, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship from the European Commission (Grant Agreement No. 894071).

Davies’s research is driven by a fascination with interdisciplinary approaches to music and death, women in music, and global song and piano culture. His monograph The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert was published by Boydell & Brewer in 2024. His edited volume Clara Schumann Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2021) has been described as a “reading that is as refreshing as it is enlightening”, with the essays “challeng[ing] the many entrenched binaries that have come to dictate our discussions of nineteenth-century music history” (Prince, 2023). Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert (Boydell & Brewer, 2019), co-edited with James Sobaskie, has similarly been praised for its “tantalizing invitation for further innovation as the Schubertian community accommodates new ideas and approaches with open arms” (Sumner Lott, 2021). His publications also include the journal issue “Clara Schumann: Changing Identities and Legacies”, guest-edited with Nicole Grimes (2023), as well as numerous contributions to essay collections and reviews of books, CDs, and scores. Forthcoming books are Clara and Robert Schumann in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2025, co-edited with Roe-Min Kok), Global Perspectives on Women Pianists, and In a New Key: Studies of Women Pianists (2026, both co-edited with Natasha Loges).

A committed public musicologist, he is co-founder (with Yvonne Liao) of the Women in Global Music Research and Industry Network, WIGM; and has chaired five international conferences, most recently Women at the Piano 1848–1970 (2023). He has served on the Council of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (2019–21); the Schubert Institute United Kingdom (2019–); the Athena SWAN Self-Assessment Team at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford (2018–20); and the Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Studies Oxford Network (2013–16). In 2024 he was elected as Chair of the Schubert Institute United Kingdom.