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 David Berezan
Professor of Electroacoustic Music
Specialisms include: Acousmatic music composition; live and interactive electroacoustic music; diffusion practice.
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.
Dr Eleanor Chan
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Specialisms include: Early modern music; visual culture; material culture; musical notation; history of the book; intellectual history.
Professor Ricardo Climent
Professor of Interactive Music Composition
Specialisms include: Live Interactive music composition (instruments, electronics and media); game-audio (in composition); Locativeaudio and media (connecting the city with the concert hall).
Professor Barry Cooper
Professor of Music
Specialisms include: Baroque keyboard music; English music theory 1600-1800; Handel; Beethoven; manuscript studies; editorial techniques; child composers.
Professor David Fanning
Professor of Music
Specialisms include: Shostakovich; Nielsen; Weinberg; 20th-century symphony; piano performance, especially chamber repertoire.
Dr Nicolò Ferrari
Research Associate
Specialisms include: late medieval and early modern music, philology, cultural history, music and crusading, palaeography and codicology, and manuscript studies
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
Lecturer in Music Analysis
Specialisms include: Analysis and reception of nineteenth-century instrumental music; music theory and analysis; approaches to musical form; Schubert.
Prof Kevin Malone
Professor of Social and Autoethnographic Composition
Specialisms include: Composition; contemporary music; electroacoustic music; experimental and postmodern music; film music.
Dr Sarah Moynihan
Lecturer in Analysis
Specialisms include: musical form in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; music theory and analysis; Jean Sibelius and Nordic music; critical theory.
Dr Evanthia Patsiaoura
Lecturer in Ethnomusicology
Specialisms include: Nigerian gospel musics; spirituality and popular culture; sound and body in congregational music-making; African Pentecostalism in translocal perspective; multi-sited ethnography and epistemology; fieldwork in Brazil, Greece, Nigeria, the UK and social media.
Professor Camden Reeves
Professor of Music
Specialisms include: Composition, contemporary music (especially Ligeti, Nancarrow, Birtwistle, Boulez and Xenakis), piano music and orchestration.
Dr Alexander Gagatsis
Lecturer in Jazz Studies | Director of Performance
Specialisms include: jazz, improvisation studies, topics in popular music, music in the Balkans, music theory and cognition.
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 Richard Whalley
Senior Lecturer in Composition
Specialisms include: Composition; contemporary music; performance; contemporary music performance.
Emeritus professors
Resident ensembles
Find out more about the resident ensembles in the Music department at Manchester.
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Visiting scholars and instrumental teachers
See our comprehensive list of distinguished visiting scholars and instrumental teachers.
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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 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.-
Professor Susan Rutherford
Professor Susan Rutherford held the following positions:
-Emerita Professor of Music.
-Visiting Research Fellow at The University of Cambridge.Read more
