Education

Anrhydeddau a Dyfarniadau

Aelodaethau proffesiynol

British Forum for Ethnomusicology

International Council for Traditional Music

Society for Ethnomusicology

Safleoedd academaidd blaenorol

2017–2018: Postdoctoral Researcher, Glasgow Caledonian University.    

2017: Visiting Lecturer, University College Dublin.    

2016–2017: Visiting Research Fellow, University of Limerick.    

2015–2017: Visiting Lecturer, Queen’s University Belfast.    

2014–2015: Research Assistant, University of Stirling.  

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My current project examines the history of loyalist songs in Northern Ireland and their role in expressing a Protestant working-class culture and identity. The project explores the role loyalist songs played during the Northern Ireland Conflict (1968-1998) and why musicians and audiences continue to produce and consume such songs, examining their role in the (re)production of cultural memory. Lastly, the project examines how loyalist songs connect to and comment on current cultural and political developments in Northern Ireland, with loyalist songs providing a unique context for understanding a divided island and a fragmenting continent after Brexit.

Before joining Cardiff University, I was Lead Researcher on the ‘Community Orientated and Opportunity Learning’ (COOL) Music project at Glasgow Caledonian University. Supported by the European Social Innovation Fund, the project engaged groups of hard-to-reach young people through participatory music-making, offering alternative approaches to education and literacy, so as to improve their health and wellbeing. Working with community music practitioners in multiply-deprived areas of Scotland, the project helped participants dealing with trauma, while developing transferable skills for further study and future employment. 

My doctoral research examined how Irish republicans used ‘rebel songs’ to resist against the British state from the late eighteenth century to the present. Through archival work, participant observation, and interviews with artists and audiences, my thesis demonstrated how rebel songs provided a form of collective, emancipatory, participatory entertainment, as well as an articulation of what republicans hope to achieve politically. The thesis explored the hagiographic potential of rebel songs to memorialize a pantheon of Irish martyrs, using music as a means to understand the history of political violence in Ireland and how this continues to inform and influence the present.