Professor Katharine Ellis

A cultural historian of music in France during the 19th and early 20th centuries, Katharine Ellis studies music ranging from medieval plainchant to Les Six. She seeks to explain the cultural import of musical tastes and practices, while also asking how those in the art-worlds of music negotiated France’s complex aesthetic, social and regulatory frameworks. Her books embrace canon-formation in the press (Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France, 1995), the French early music revival (Interpreting the Musical Past, 2005), the tangled web of Benedictine musical politics and Church/State relations c.1900 (The Politics of Plainchant in fin-de-siècle France, 2013), and the history of French music and music-making from provincial viewpoints (French Musical Life, 2022 [2021], winner of the 2023 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society). She is co-editor, with Phyllis Weliver, of an essay collection (Words & Notes, 2013) and a course-book (Reading Texts in Music and Literature, forthcoming 2025) respectively, on the study of word-music relations. Her current research project addresses the turbulent history of Catholic music across French régimes from the Revolution to the aftermath of the 1905 Separation. She will take up a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in September 2024 to pursue this project.

She has has held Lectureships at the Open University and Royal Holloway, and chairs at the Universities of London and Bristol. Fellowship awards from the AHRC, British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust have enabled much of her work. In 2006, she became inaugural Director of the Institute of Musical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Elected to the Academia Europaea in 2010, she became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2013, and was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2017. In 2021 she was elected as Vice-President of the American Musicological Society, to serve 2022-24.

Katharine Ellis welcomes PhD applications from students wishing to work within the cultural history of western music, especially in France and the UK, in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her former PhD students have studied: Puccini in the Italian Press; Musical Debate in Early 20th-Century Britain; Music in the Women's Institute; Musical Biography; University Music Education in 19th-Century Britain; Conservatoire Education in Portugal to 1910; The BBC and French Music during World War II; Funding New Music in 20th-Century London; The Prix de Rome during the Romantic Era; Puppet Opera in the 1920s; Women and Music in 19th-Century Mexico; Music and Propaganda in WWI Paris; Indo-Europeanism in France from Fétis to Messiaen; Historicism in French Sacred Music. Current students are working on Debussy in 20th-Century China, and French Music Festivals Post-1945.