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Staff Profile

Professor Kirsten Gibson

Professor of Early Modern Music and Culture / Deputy Head of the School of Arts and Cultures

Background

Background

I read music at Newcastle University, graduating in 2000 and winning the David Barlow Best Finalist Prize, and completed an AHRB-funded PhD in 2006 on John Dowland’s printed ayres supervised by Prof. Ian Biddle and Prof. Magnus Williamson. My research focuses on music in early modern England, placing it in broader cultural contexts through explorations of poetry, politics, print, authorship, gender, status, book history and the history of reading.

My teaching and research supervision covers musical culture in sixteenth-, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, and I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

I also appear on BBC Radio 3's Record Review as a guest expert reviewing early music recordings.

Qualifications

  • BA (Hons), First Class
  • MLitt, with Distinction
  • PhD ('John Dowland's Printed Ayres: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts'), AHRB-Funded (now AHRC)
  • CASAP (Certificate of Advanced Studies in Academic Practice)

 


Research

Research Interests

My work situates early modern music in wider cultural, social and political contexts. I have published widely on the lutenist and composer John Dowland, with a particular focus on his use of print to fashion an authorial identity and the social and political contexts encapsulated in his lute songs. My research interests include: early modern debates about music; music, gender and social class in early modern England; theorising history through sound studies; the sale and circulation of printed music in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries; the social and geographical spread of recreational music making; vernacular musical culture; and recovering evidence for musical life in early modern North-East England. My methodologies draw on archival research, close readings of musical and textual primary materials, and drawing widely on approaches from outside the field of musicology – particularly from literature studies, gender studies and book and print history. My work seeks to challenge traditional narratives of music history, to bring early modern musical culture into conversation with broader cultural histories, and to establish new perspectives on English music from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. 


Current Work

My current research focusses on music books in early modern England - print and manuscript - but shifts the emphasis from the production of books and authorship towards a history of reading. My research traces the sale, circulation and ownership of music books from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and seeks to rethink the social and geographical reach of literate recreational music making. It explores anew well-known socially elite collectors and contexts by placing them in a broader nexus of musical activity, music book ownership and use. It takes account of a broad cast of historical actors and a wide range of spaces that music books inhabited and in which they were realised in sound through acts of ‘reading’ as musical performance. My research explores the social functions of music books for a variety of amateur musicians who fashioned social identities through the acquisition of musical skills and literacies (textual, notation, tablature), engagement in recreational music making, and ownership, compilation or creation of music books that supported and signalled such activity.


I am a Co-Investigator of the AHRC-Funded 'Music, Heritage, Place' project, led by Professor Stephen Rose at Royal Holloway, University of London. This project will uncover and investigate the music manuscripts and printed music from c.1550 to c.1850 held in local archives across England. It will document these sources by creating catalogue records within the database Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) and within the Cecilia database run by IAML UK (International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres). 


Postgraduate Supervision and Postdoctoral Mentoring

I supervise Masters and doctoral research, and mentor postdoctoral fellowships, on various aspects of music in early modern England, and particularly welcome enquiries to work on any of the research areas outlined above.


Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

MUS2051: Case Studies in Early Music (Module Leader)

MUS3088: Folk Music, Gender and Identity (Contributor)

Major and Minor Specialist Study Dissertations and Projects (Module Leader)


Postgraduate Teaching

Cultural Histories of Music


Publications