People
We attract the very best talent and our staff are both international and internationally recognised.
Our inspiring academics can give our students first-hand access to cutting-edge research and real-world knowledge to take with them after graduation.
Head of subject
Academic staff
Dr Chloë Alaghband-Zadeh
Lecturer in Ethnomusicology
Specialisms include: music of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora (including North Indian classical music); gender; music analysis; improvisation; affect; ways of theorising listening and listeners.
Professor Caroline Bithell
Professor of Ethnomusicology
Specialisms include: Corsica/the Mediterranean; Georgia (Caucasus); voice; protest song; music revivals; intangible cultural heritage; cultural tourism; politics of world music.
Dr Joshua Brown
Lecturer in Composition
Specialisms include: composition; contemporary music; collaborative and community music; music and mathematics; and performance.
Professor Ricardo Climent
Professor of Interactive Music Composition
Specialisms include: Live Interactive Media with a focus on game-engines and Machine Learning. In the entrepreneurial space, he founded KeepItHuman(.org), a spin-out company using video games as a transformative medium to engage the public with sustainability.
Professor Barry Cooper
Professor of Music
Specialisms include: Baroque keyboard music; English music theory 1600-1800; Handel; Beethoven; manuscript studies; editorial techniques; child composers.
Dr Pete Furniss
Lecturer in Music
Specialisms include: music performance, improvisation and experimental practice (clarinet), embodied research, pedagogy, 4E cognition and neurodiversity.
Dr Alexander Gagatsis
Lecturer in Jazz Studies
Specialisms include: jazz, improvisation studies, topics in popular music, music in the Balkans, music theory and cognition.
Professor James Garratt
Professor of Music History and Aesthetics
Specialisms include: Music in 19th-century German thought and culture; aesthetics; music and politics.
Dr Roddy Hawkins
Lecturer in Music
Specialisms include: New Complexity in Britain; the new music ensemble; new music reception, historiography and methodology; representations and materialities of listening (intersections between popular music studies and sound studies).
Professor Rebecca Herissone
Professor of Musicology
Specialisms include: Purcell and seventeenth-century English music; creativity in early modern music; early modern manuscript and print cultures; ontological issues relating to Baroque music; Baroque performance practice; English music theory 1580-1730. Professor Herissone was made a Fellow of The British Academy in 2019, one of the highest distinctions in the humanities.
Dr Anne Hyland
Senior Lecturer in Music Analysis
Specialisms include: the analysis, reception history, and editing of nineteenth-century instrumental music; music theory and analysis; the music of Franz Schubert and his Viennese contemporaries; the analysis and theorisation of sonata and variation forms; music temporality, and the intersection between music history, philosophy and analysis.
Sarah Keirle
Lecturer in Electroaocustic Composition
Dr Sarah Moynihan
Lecturer in Music
Specialisms include: musical form in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; music theory and analysis; Jean Sibelius and Nordic music; critical theory.
Dr David Onac
Lecturer in Harmony and Contemporary Music Studies
Specialisms include: composition, tonal harmony, piano performance, jazz & gospel (particularly harmony and improvisation), arrangement.
Dr Alessandra Palidda
Research Associate, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
Specialisms include: social history of music, opera studies, methodology of musicological research and repertoire studies
Professor Camden Reeves
Professor of Music
Specialisms include: Composition, contemporary music (especially Ligeti, Nancarrow, Birtwistle, Boulez and Xenakis), piano music and orchestration.
Eleanor Ryan
Lecturer in Performance Studies
Specialisms include: Practice-led intercultural, transdisciplinary and critical performance studies research; Application of decolonial, feminist and posthuman theory to performance studies and pedagogy; contemporary higher music education.
Professor Thomas Schmidt
Professor of Music / Head of the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
Specialisms include: Music of the 15th/16th and the 18th/19th centuries. In the Renaissance period, his main focus has been on word-music relationships and in the materiality, creation and transmission of polyphonic sources. In the Classical/Romantic period, his focus has been on Felix Mendelssohn, with editions of the major symphonies for the composer’s Complete Edition.
Dr Rosalía Soria Luz
Lecturer in Composition for Interactive Media and Film
Specialisms include: Electroacoustic music composition (live interactive media and fixed media for the moving image), use of algorithms and mathematical models in music composition and EA music for broader audiences.
Dr Richard Whalley
Senior Lecturer in Composition
Specialisms include: Composition; contemporary music; performance; contemporary music performance.
Dr Hannah Yip
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Specialisms include: early modern music; visual culture; material culture; history of the book; history of emotions; early modern manuscript and print cultures; ecclesiastical history; Reformation studies.
International Jazz Artists in Residence
Emeritus professors
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Professor John Casken
Professor John Casken held the following positions:
-Emeritus Professor of Music. Professor of Music at The University of Manchester, 1992 to 2008.
-Doctor of Civil Law, honoris causa, University of King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2011.
-Doctor of Music, honoris causa, University of Birmingham, 2011.Read more
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Professor David Fallows
Professor David Fallows held the following positions:
-Emeritus Professor of Musicology.
-Taught at The University of Manchester, 1976 - 2011.
-Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Republique Francaise), 1994.Read more
Professor David Fanning
Professor of Music
Specialisms include: Shostakovich; Nielsen; Weinberg; 20th-century symphony; piano performance, especially chamber repertoire.
Professor Philip Grange
Professor Philip Grange held the following positions:
- Emeritus Professor of Composition.
- University of Manchester Professor of Composition, 2000-2020.
- University of Exeter Professor of Composition, 1989-2000.
- Fellow in the Creative Arts, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1985-1987.
- Northern Arts Composer Fellow, Durham University, 1988-1989.
Prof Kevin Malone
Professor of Social and Autoethnographic Composition
Specialisms include: Composition; contemporary music; electroacoustic music; experimental and postmodern music; film music.-
Professor Susan Rutherford
Professor Susan Rutherford held the following positions:
-Emerita Professor of Music.
-Visiting Research Fellow at The University of Cambridge.Read more
Honorary Professors and Research Fellows
Sir Mark Elder
Honorary Professor
Dr Hongshuo Fan
Honorary Research Fellow
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Dr Jeffrey Dean
Honorary Research Fellow
Dr Sarah Whitfield
Honorary Research Fellow
Helena Bull
Honorary Research Fellow
Daniel Mawson
Honorary Research Fellow