As ‘a humanities geek in the body of a musician’, Alexander’s professional involvement in higher education stretches back to the late nineties. For most of this time he has been a guest lecturer and workshop tutor in universities and music colleges across the UK (with occasional visits abroad to institutions in the US, Continental Europe and Africa) and sacred music traditions of the Black Atlantic have collectively been the thread that has undergirded – and continues to undergird – his entire academic career. He has also held visiting teaching/supervision posts at HEIs that include the Universities of York, Cambridge, Royal Holloway and Oxford as well as the London School of Theology (some of which affiliations continue) and he is a returning guest lecturer at the University of Leeds. Alexander also teaches at Trinity Laban (where he works across music and applied humanities) as well as other HEIs. Having served as a Co-Editor for Contemporary Music Review, he is an Associate Editor for History of Anthropology Review. And in June 2023 Alexander was elected by the Society for the Study of Theology as their Assistant Secretary for Theology and Race before being appointed to his current position at KCL – which has led to many changes in his outputs, practices and priorities. In addition to his work as Lecturer and EDI Lead in the Department of Music, Alexander holds Research Associateships in/at Philosophy and Medicine at KCL as well as the Centre for Art and the Sacred at King’s (ASK). In 2024/2025 he will present discipline-specific research papers in philosophy and theology as well as music.

Alexander is also very active in an intersectional vanguard that involves HPSM (history and philosophy of science and medicine), health/medical humanities (especially ‘clinical humanities’) and creative health. Having been given an opportunity to lead an antiracism project as the fixed-term Antiracism Facilitator for the Society for the Social History of Medicine, Alexander’s research priorities shifted very drastically. During 2022/2023, alongside Chris Millard of Sheffield University Alexander received a grant from the the Wellcome Trust through the Northern Network for the Medical Humanities to develop the research network Pain and b/Black Identity: Race in Medicine – and although for several reasons including significant health challenges this network’s work has yet to begin, it is a project that will finally take flight in 2024/2025.

Alexander is proud to have been part of the inaugural Artists Represent Recovery Network (2023) and in 2024/2025 he looks forward to completing this process by undertaking some placement work at the Maudsley Hospital as part of what he hopes will lead to opportunities to develop new work on culturally literate and technically-informed non-clinical arts-and-health (or rather, creative health) interventions. He is also very interested in the EDI issues that currently obtain across teaching/training, research and practice in the BAMT-led British music therapy guild.

Having established a reputation as one of the pre-eminent gospel choral directors in the UK, a quite remarkable sequence of events led to Alexander receiving a major scholarship to study choral conducting with Simon Halsey, Adrian Partington and Neil Ferris only to discover that in the UK it has proven to be all-but-impossible to bring different modes of ensemble direction together in genuinely culturally literate and idiomatically credible ways. As such, despite what will remain a lifelong association with this music, Alexander no longer works in contemporary gospel music as an ensemble director and instead focusses on opportunities to work in ‘SATB gospel’ as well as classical music (not least as a guest conductor of the Choir of King’s College London). Alexander is also an award-winning jazz pianist (who is slowly emerging from ‘retirement’) and he is also working on his jazz clarinet playing whilst playing gospel music on the saxophone. He also writes and arranges choral and instrumental music that brings gospel music into constructive dialogue with classical music and jazz. He is the EDI Lead and Chair of the EDI Working Group for the Royal Musical Association Music Philosophy Study Group and maintains an very active interested in the decolonisation of both ‘Kantian’ critique and performance practice in so-called ‘early music’ (in a Western sense of this rubric), not least the sacred music of J.S. Bach and his contemporaries.

Research Interests

Alexander’s research identity began with music and theology before expanding to multiple issues constellating around philosophical and theological anthropology, aesthetics, epistemology, ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ phenomenology, the critical medical humanities, sociology of religion and race. Hermeneutics is also part of both his teaching and research oeuvres and undergirds his commitment to anticolonial and antiracist meaning-making and world-building. In addition to the foregoing, his contractual obligations mean that Alexander is also taking an increased (research) interest in pedagogy within tertiary music education.

• Aesthetics & Neuroaesthetics
• Phenomenology ('pure' and 'applied', including phenomenological psychopathology)
• African-Diasporic Music/s
• Anthropology (cultural, linguistic, philosophical and psychiatric)
• Theology (and Sociology of Religion)
• Critical and Cultural Theory/ies
• Improvisation and Performance
• Decolonising Baroque Music
• Philosophies of Mind and Language
• Epistemology & Hermeneutics
• History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine
• Critical Medical Humanities
• Anticolonialism (including both postcolonial and decolonial perspectives)

Until further notice, Alexander is not currently accepting PhD students.

Teaching

As an HE teacher, Alexander’s work at KCL primarily focusses on the philosophy and anthropology of music (more on this here). His UG and MMus teaching/supervision practice is also undergirded by anticolonial and antiracist epistemic motivations. A specialist in multiple musics of the Black Atlantic with significant interests in sacred and secular music of the Jews, musical aesthetics, philosophy of music more broadly, theoretical ethnomusicology, ‘sound epistemologies’ within sociology of religion and more, his courses are framed by bespoke ‘philosophical anthropologies’ for each musical area being investigated by which means students engage in questioning what music means to different people in different places at different times, but how different ways of being human also mean different ways of being musical (and as such, strongly resisting Western-centric and logocentric approaches to music whilst not disavowing either the Western art music canon or all Western methods/methodologies completely by any means).

Expertise and Public Engagement

Alexander is a very experienced facilitator and public speaker. In the past he has made several appearances on BBC Radio as an interviewee in his own right as well as presenting the Daily Service on BBC Radio 4 and served as Music Director for several religious broadcasts. During the 2016 BBC Proms he was specially invited to appear on the BBC World Service alongside Sarah Walker on a special broadcast featuring British gospel music. He has consulted to several cultural organisations including the National Maritime Museum during their 2007 abolition bicentennial commemorations. As an Associate of NHS Research and Development NW he has worked with health researchers on projects centring around communication, creativity and community. He is a longstanding proponent of outreach and engagement work in the arts and cultural sectors, one example being his work as an advocate for ‘differently-abled’ rail network users.

Selected Publications

Website (including publications page) currently under development.