Emma Dillon is Professor of Music and Medieval Studies. She studied music at Oxford as an undergraduate (1989-1992), went on to complete a DPhil in 1998, and was also the recipient of a Junior Research Fellowship. She worked as a Lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol (1998-2000). In 2000 she moved to the United States and joined the Music Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked until 2012 first as an Assistant Professor and later as a Full Professor, and where she also served as Chair of the Department.

She has been a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, a Member and Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Studies (School of Historical Studies) in Princeton, a Visiting Scholar at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and in 2021 was Visiting Professor at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She joined the Music Department at King’s in 2013 and is an active member of the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies. Emma is recipient of a Leverhulme Trust Major Grant (2016-2019) and a British Academy Small Grant (2016-2017). Between 2023-2028 she is PI of Musical Lives: Towards an Historical Anthropology of French Song, 1100-1300 [MUSLIVE], awarded by the ERC Advanced Grant scheme and subsequently funded through the UKRI Horizon Guarantee.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Medieval music and culture, 1100-1400
• History of sound; sound studies
• History of material texts
• Medievalism studies

Emma Dillon’s research focuses on European musical culture from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Her work ranges widely in terms of repertories, sources, and methodological approach, and broadly speaking falls at the intersection of musicology, sound studies, medieval studies, and the history of material texts. She is the author of Medieval Music-Making and the Roman de Fauvel (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260-1330 (Oxford University Press in 2012), and numerous articles exploring the place of sound and music in medieval culture, including studies of the afterlives of medieval music. She is completing a book, Singing Knights: Living with Songs in the Age of French Romance, 1170-1220, exploring relationships between trouvère songs, medieval romance and documentary culture.

Between 2023-2028 she is PI of Musical Lives: Towards an Historical Anthropology of French Song, 1100-1300, an interdisciplinary collaboration devoted to the study of songs, poetry and people in the medieval Mediterranean (a UKRI Frontier Grant, previously assessed by the ERC Advanced Grant Scheme). In this project, she works closely with a team of postdoctoral researchers Dr Alice Hicklin (history), Dr Betty Rosen (medieval Arabic and Hebrew poetry) and Dr Geneviève Young (medieval French and Occitan literature) to develop a new methodology for a song-centred history. Practice-led research is another component of the project, with the team regularly working with performers. Previously, Emma has been the recipient of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship from 2016-2019 for a project entitled 'The Romance of Song', exploring the emergence of trouvère song in 12th-century France in the era before the chansonnier; and a British Academy Small Grant (2016-17) for the related project 'Things that Sing', exploring the intersections of sound, music and objects in courtly culture c.1160-1350. These projects also fostered a creative application for her research in the museum environment, and included collaboration with scholars, curators and practitioners.

Teaching

Emma has won several awards for her teaching. She teaches modules at the undergraduate and graduate level, on a range of topics relating to music, manuscripts, and sonic culture more generally in the Middle Ages, covering a wide array of repertories and environments, from Christian chant to courtly song across the Mediterranean. While at King’s, Emma has developed practice-led approaches in her teaching, building performance and composition into students’ learning experience. Study of primary sources is often enriched through class visits to local library and museum collections such as Lambeth Palace Library and the British Museum. Emma also has experience in interdisciplinary team teaching at undergraduate and graduate levels in both Music and Medieval Studies.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Emma works with performers, curators, sound artists, and scholars to explore the intersections of sound, music and objects in medieval culture, and is committed in the application of this research through cultural partnerships so as to make medieval music more widely accessible to a broader public. Since 2017 she has collaborated with the British Museum on a lecture-recital series ‘Things that Sing’ and on a film, ‘The Musical World of Thomas Becket’, to accompany their 2021 exhibition, Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of a Saint. In 2022, she curated an exhibition at the Parker Library, Corpus Christi Cambridge, ‘Listening in the Library’, exploring the place of sound and music in Matthew Parker’s collection. Her project Musical Lives brings together singers and scholars to develop a new approach to the performances of medieval songs and poetry, some in partnership with the Temple Music Foundation. Emma has also regularly appeared on Radio 3 and Radio 4 programmes devoted to medieval music. She was pen-holder on the REF 2021 case study, Resounding Societies: Restoration, Preservation and Performance of Lost or Endangered Music, bringing her work into dialogue with contributions of her colleagues Katherine Schofield and Martin Stokes in areas of practice-led research.

Emma has served as a Director-at-large of the American Musicological Society (2014-2016) and as Programme Chair for the Society’s annual meeting. She has served on the editorial boards of journals such as the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and on the Advisory Board of the University of Pennsylvania Press. She currently serves on the editorial board for Resonances: The Journal of Sound and Culture and she is the founder and series editor of Sound in History, a monograph series published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.