I am a Lecturer in Music and have been at King’s since 2022, having previously held teaching and research posts at Cambridge, UC Berkeley and Cardiff.

Research Interests

• 19th- and 20th-Century Music
• Sound Studies
• Environmental Humanities

I work on the politics of sound and listening and I have published essays on Italian and British music, including the history of sound art. I’ve also worked on listening in wartime and sound reproduction technology: my first book, Format Friction, is about the global record industry and the many different ways people listened to shellac discs in Singapore and British Malaya, Italian diaspora in New York, and in South Wales (where I grew up).

Some of my current research looks into conditions under which energy systems become audible, both in musical cultures and in everyday life. Together with co-editors Annette Davison and Laudan Nooshin, and an interdisciplinary group, I am putting together a book called Critical Perspectives on Petrosonics, which focuses on the many ways in which coal and oil have shaped the senses in the Anthropocene. I’m a member of an interdisciplinary network that promotes the study of energy humanities in Wales, and a senior researcher associated with Fiona Smyth’s ERC-funded project (‘Spectres and Camouflage’) on the technological history of silent environments across the twentieth century.

Teaching

I teach a range of courses on music from 1800 to the present, including music and digital culture, film music, music and the environment, and sound studies. Other courses I have taught include musical futurism in the twentieth century; research methodologies; popular music and media; as well as guest seminars in music, history and literary studies. I am a fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HFEA).

I am always happy to talk to students about dissertation ideas (undergraduate theses, master’s and PhD) so please feel free to be in touch.

Expertise and public engagement

• Convenor of the Music Department's Colloquium Series (open to the public)

Selected publications

• Format Friction: Perspectives on the Shellac Disc (University of Chicago Press, 2024)
• 'Shellac as Musical Plastic', Journal of the American Musicological Society 74/3 (2021), 463–500.
• 'The Reproduction of Caruso', Cambridge Opera Journal 33/1-2 (2022), 161-179.
• Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense (Oxford University Press, 2019), winner of the Royal Musical Association/Cambridge University Press Prize for Outstanding Edited Collection 2020.