Postgraduate Research Supervisors

Postgraduate Research Programme Leader

Amy is open to proposals for creative and innovative performance-centred research along the spectrum from musicology to artistic research, on topics including: live versus recording studio performance practices; ethnographic approaches to studying classical music-making; collaborative and experimental performance and working practices; and recordings as evidence of past performance practice. 

Graduate Research Training and Development Leader

Biranda’s research interests are in the areas of intercultural pedagogy and institutional discourse. She welcomes PG research applications from teachers who are genuinely interested in discovering something new about their practice. 

Head of Research

Cormac's research primarily addresses nineteenth-century French and Italian opera and literature. He welcomes projects in the fields of nineteenth-century French and Italian opera, music in literature, film music and cultural transfer, adaptation studies, reception studies. 

Postgraduate Research Programme Leader

Dr Simon Bayly works broadly in the fields of theatre and live art and is open to supervising projects these broad areas, including: participatory art practices; art and ecology; the material and social architectures of performance and place; the psychodynamics of groups and organizations; intersections of performance, philosophy and psychoanalysis. 

Vice Principal & Director of Production Art

Andy offers supervision in areas including performance and/as cultural production; theatre/performance and representation; contemporary performance forms and technologies; cross-media performance and production; theatres of the real; and creative paradigms, processes and pedagogies for the performing arts.

Head of Historical Performance, Deputy Head of Academic Studies

Dr Christopher Suckling is interested in supporting projects through which performance suggests new insights into current and historical musical practices, challenging the established traditions of historical performance or applying their methods to music of the nearer past. He is also interested in projects pursuing very particular aspects of historical performance practices.

Head of Centre of Creative Performance & Classical Improvisation

David welcomes enquiries related to classical improvisation, particularly the following: creativity in performance, state of flow and improvisational state of mind, fusing spontaneity and structural awareness in real-time, expression and its communication in music-making, active listening, mind-reading, and empathy in music-making. 

Head of Acting & Programme Leader

David's research interests include black British theatre/performance, pre-modern popular theatre forms and their contemporary applications specifically mask/minstrelsy, pantomime, burlesque/ neo burlesque, music hall, cabaret, pierrot, concert parties, hip hop theatre and revue.  As well as systems of actor training and practice. 

Deputy Head of Music Therapy

Dr Donald Wetherick is a music therapist in adult mental health and a music therapy trainer. His PhD was in music therapy pedagogy and multiple musicianships. Donald is interested in music therapy/music and mental health/wellbeing, higher music education across disciplines, and in critical discourse methods of research.

Head of Academic Studies

Eliot’s research centres on mask practice, folly and embodiment. He collaborates with practitioners around the world to explore questions of theatre, acting, performance and training. His interests focus on pedagogy, artistic research and physical practice. 

Design Lecturer

Emily is particularly interested in supervising practice-as-research projects that are experimental and interdisciplinary, touching on performance, live art, visual art, autoethnography, scenography.

Associate Head of Composition (UG)

Hollie is interested in exploring how the varied construction of the scenarios of listening and performance, can impact upon the processes of composition. Her research interests include spatialisation, deep listening, performance installations, precarity, soundscape, immersion, music as environment, multitudes, heterophony, working with amateurs, open scores, music and the environment, layering, stretching, memory, nostalgia, conceptualism, cross art and cross discipline collaboration.

Composition Lecturer

Julian Anderson is a composer, with regular performances both internationally and at home in the UK.

Head of Composition

Julian Philips works in operatic, concert, dance and theatre settings, exploring cross-art dialogues, whether with text, movement or image; his practice is informed by a heightened concern for specific social and performing contexts. He welcomes projects that explore cross-art dialogues, new opera development, the theatricalisation of concert performance, and community/education environments for contemporary composition.

Research Fellow

Karen is a music psychologist with research interests in singing (including sensorimotor skills; development and training; identity; non-singing adults; singing difficulties; imagery), as well as more broadly in performance and elite training (including wellbeing). She is interested in practice-based and interdisciplinary work and welcomes applications that incorporate a psychological (empirical) approach to performance, music perception/production, training or music therapy.

Research Lead for Music Therapy

Dr Kate Jones is passionate about social impact focussed or health and well-being related research. Her PhD investigated the use of Music Therapy for young children with Selective Mutism. Other research interests include neuroscience, neurodiversity and trauma.

Professor of Composition

Laura is a composer, vocalist and the Artistic Director of Size Zero Opera. She specialises in theatre, multi-disciplinary work and opera.

Professor of Composition

Laurence Crane is a composer working in the fields of ‘contemporary classical’ and ‘experimental’ music. His research interests include form and structure in contemporary composition, fragility and precarity, notation, temporality in music, the materiality of sound, and the relationship of composition and performance. Laurence is particularly intrigued by what happens when seemingly disparate musical objects are combined. He is interested in supervising practice-based composition projects of all kinds.

Professor, Academic Studies

Maria welcomes projects in the field of piano and pianism, practice-as-research, art song, cultural history and artistic practices, 19th century to 1990 Russian and Soviet Empires, Post-Soviet cultural legacies (various geographies), music and displacement (emigre music, music and space, music and cultural memory), fin de siecle artistic collaborations, aesthetics/philosophy and music performance, music performance and composition as (auto)biographical practice, women performers, composers, memoirists, arrangers and chroniclers. 

Professor of Electronic & Produced Music

Marios holds a Ph.D. in interactive composition and is the game audio lead professor and research coordinator at the Department of Electronic & Produced. His first educational book on game composition, The Game Music Toolbox, was published by Routledge in May 2023.

Professor of Composition

Matt welcomes doctoral supervisees for DMus/PhD topics related to any of his research and/or compositional interests: Composition practice research, music and narrative (post 1900), topic theory, adaptation theory, musical analysis, Jazz (particularly 1950-1970).

Manager of Music Education Islington

Mirjam is manager of Music Education Islington - a partnership between Islington Council and the Guildhall School that works to bring a wide, varied music offer to all children and young people in the borough. Accordingly, her current research interests are primarily in areas relevant to this field: training, group teaching, and understanding barriers that prevent children and young people from accessing music education. More broadly, Mirjam’s work centres on creativity in performance, rehearsal strategies, and understanding audiences. 

Professor of Composition and Electronic Music

Professor Nye Parry is a composer and sound artist working across the EPM, Composition and Research departments. Areas of particular interest include: sound art and sound installation; spatial and site-specific music; composition using Max/MSP ; acousmatic music and theory; music and contemporary dance; non-notated musics and non-traditional notational approaches; Balinese Gamelan.

Acting Head of Composition

Paul Newland is a composer primarily of acoustic concert music but has also collaborated on a number of dance works. His research interest include: materiality, temporality, incompleteness, liminality and the in-between, fragmentation, fragility and continuity, the infrathin, colour, extreme quietness, audibility, “close listening” or “listening in”, field recordings, noise, music as environment/environment as music, presence, immersion, slowing/slowness/stretching/blurring, surface, repetition, self-similarity, extended duration, superimposition/covering/layering, dance, Japanese culture and aesthetics, improvisation, electric guitar, conceptualism, Richard Morris, the Beats, Josef and Anni Albers, slow cinema.

Leadership 2nd Year Supervisor, Creative Learning

Preetha Narayanan is a violinist composer, and educator with a unique musical story that crosses countries, cultures, and genres. Her work focuses on comparative studies between Western and Indian Classical music. Research interests include intercultural collaboration, pedagogy, and music-making, with particular interest in hybrid identities.

Artist in Residence (Research)

Richard's research outputs primarily take the form of Practice Research in composition, and reflect my interest in various kinds of transcription, adaptation and transformation of existing/found musical and other sonic material (including speech), often using technology/various forms of ‘computer listening’. Richard is particularly interested in supervising projects that relate to these interests, but has supervised on, and is happy to receive proposals in, the following areas: Practice Research in Composition; Musical Modernisms after Postmodernism; Innovative models of opera/music-theatre making; Queer music-making; Music & Narrative; Adaptation Studies; Contemporary Music performance

Tutor in Music Philosophy and Aesthetics

Sam's research uses cultural and critical theories to think about contemporary music and sound art in a changing society. Among other areas, he enjoys working with postgraduate researchers interested in music’s relation to questions of philosophy, materiality, and meaning.

Professor of Composition

Stephen is a librettist interested in research projects which are exploring the relationship between words and music, specifically, but not exclusively, opera libretto. He also has a related interest in operetta, oratorio and the history of song, from folk-song to music theatre. 

Academic Studies Tutor

Steve's research interests include music composition and politics; rap, hip-hop, dada, punk, activism, anti-art; critical theory; composition informed by theory; naive music; opera, spoken word, music with textual and/or theatrical components; free jazz; improvisers orchestras, conduction, cross-cultural collaboration, protest music, outsider music; the avant-garde (African, Asian, American, European) and ideology; Gamelan; noise musics; Nietzsche, Adorno, Gilroy, Marx, Foucault; alternative institutions, aesthetic strategies of resistance; wabi-sabi; composition engaged with popular culture, science fiction, utopias, heterotopias.

Design Lecturer

Susannah's research territory currently bridges scenography, autobiographical performance and 'matrescence' (the process of becoming a mother). Susannah is interested in supervising projects within the fields of expanded scenography, autobiographical performance or queer-feminist performance, alongside scenographic projects situated within arts and crafts practices: drawing, painting, ceramics or textiles, for example.

Professor of Composition

Sylvia is interested in the following research areas: composition, experimental music, materiality of sound, fragility, decay, collaboration, temporality, open forms, indeterminacy, notation, timbre, prepared instruments, the creative process.

Professor of Composition and Programme Leader, MA in Opera Making and Writing

Toby is a specialist in vocal and electronic composition, whose work draws on practice-led research, musicology, philosophy, and cultural sociology to examine hybrid and ‘messy' spaces between genres and practices. He also has research interests in music and theatre, socially-engaged composition (including community projects and healthcare), the philosophy of performance, queer music-making, and electronic dance music.