Following two years as Lecturer in Music (2022–24), Sophie is now a Visiting Fellow at King’s. Since completing her PhD in 2013, she has held teaching posts at the University of Edinburgh, University of Nottingham, University of Sheffield, and Liverpool Hope University. For several years she was a Research Assistant on projects relating to music criticism and contemporary music at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Throughout her career she has combined her academic work with roles in arts organisations including the European Opera Centre, Music in the Round, and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. She is a tutor for the Open College of the Arts and a freelance writer and speaker on music.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
• North American music, especially Leonard Bernstein
• Ballet, opera, music theatre
• Sketch studies
• Reception studies

Sophie is a specialist in music and dance since 1900. She has a particular interest in North American music and ballet, with the nature of theatrical collaboration a focus. Her first book, Bernstein and Robbins: The Early Ballets, was published in 2021 as part of the Eastman Studies in Music series and named a 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. It was released in paperback in 2023. In recent years she has also contributed to The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, The Cambridge Stravinsky Encyclopedia, and written on the relationship between Bernstein and Copland for Leonard Bernstein in Context. She is currently working on articles related to American Ballet Theatre's 1946 Covent Garden tour and the set designers Jo Mielziner and Oliver Smith. A larger book project exploring the place of international music and musicians in postwar London – and attendant issues of transnational identity and cultural exchange – is in progress.

Teaching

Sophie is an experienced teacher, having taught on around 40 different modules during her career. She has convened undergraduate and postgraduate courses on music history, performance, theory, and analysis, and has supervised dissertations on topics related to music since 1900 and music for the stage. At King's, Sophie has taught musicology modules on opera, ballet, and music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She was nominated for a King's Education Award in 2023 and during her time at the University of Sheffield was nominated for a Vice-Chancellor's Award for Learning and Teaching.

Expertise and public engagement

Sophie writes programme notes and articles on music for leading organisations including the BBC and Wigmore Hall. She regularly gives pre-concert talks and hosts musical events, and has been an invited guest on BBC Radio 3 (Proms and Opera on 3). As Curator for the European Opera Centre, she devised and hosted an adult opera education series in Liverpool, and trained animateurs involved in the Centre’s education programme. She has also been engaged as a Dramaturg, working on a project featuring the music of Toch and Eisler for Nationaltheater Mannheim in Germany.

Selected publications

• Bernstein and Robbins: The Early Ballets (Rochester University Press, 2021), 323pp.
• 33 entries on dance, dancers, and choreographers in The Cambridge Stravinsky Encyclopedia, ed. Edward Campbell and Peter O'Hagan (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
• 'Old Divisions and New Debates: Music Criticism in Postwar America,' in The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, ed. Christopher Dingle (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 671–94.