I am currently completing a DPhil in Music at Wadham College Oxford, working under the supervision of Professor Georgina Born. Previously, I obtained an MA in Popular Music and Culture from Oxford Brookes University funded by an AHRC award, a BMus from King's College London, and a foundation diploma in Art & Design from Camberwell College of Arts.
My DPhil thesis is an ethnography of evolving musical and sonic publics in London UK, with a particular focus on questions of affect, access, and socio-political transformation. It is motivated by a desire to question the urban social and political possibilities afforded by convergences of music, sound and space. Working across four field sites-sound art, classical and 'new' music, electronic dance music, and dub reggae-I trace different kinds of 'sonic socialities' currently emerging in and across London, exploring the extent to which normative social and spatial stratifications are re-configured or reproduced by music/sound.
I have taught tutorials at numerous Oxford colleges in topics such as the psychology of music and the socio-cultural study of music. Other research and creative interests include dancing and dance cultures, ethnographic film, video art, music and politics, affect and the body, anthropology, architecture and urban life. I am an affiliate graduate student of the ERC-funded programme 'Music, Digitization, Mediation' at Oxford University, and an external affiliate of the collaborative research group 'Recomposing the City' at Queen's University Belfast. I am also a member of the Lucky Cloud Sound System, and occasionally DJ and co-run club nights in London.
During my time as an Ertegun scholar, I was granted exceptional opportunities. I co-organised (with Georgina Born) an international conference, Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience (March 2013), and co-curated a three-day digital music festival at Modern Art Oxford with a fellow Ertegun scholar (May 2013). Organising events of this scale was a phenomenal experience, and, together with the unmatchable community spirit and workspace afforded by Ertegun House, and the full funding of my studies, a truly remarkable and life changing privilege. I express my deepest gratitude to Mica and Ahmet Ertegun.
Awards
The Purcell Prize for Music (King's College London, 2011)
AHRC-Block Grant Partnership Award (Oxford Brookes University, 2011)
Ertegun Graduate Scholarship in the Humanities (Oxford University, 2012)
