Research Interests
I am a social-cultural historian of twentieth century Europe, with a particular interest in Britain and Germany. My research explores the Anglo-German relationship of the mid-twentieth century through the prism of symphonic concert tours to Britain by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Arguing that such tours sat at the interstices of a variety of intersecting histories that traversed the North Sea, it deploys an interdisciplinary framework—drawn from musicology, anthropology, and histories of the senses and the emotions—to draw out of them a variety of underlying themes—including discourses of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘European civilisation’, aesthetic thought, everyday habits of cultural encounter, and the forces of modern commercialism—that together invested them with meaning for contemporaries. In turn, it poses a challenge to enduring narratives of German musical/cultural exceptionalism and received assumptions about the differentiated workings of culture under (former) dictatorships and democracies, both of which so often continue to inform much of the scholarship for the period.
Supervisor: Dr. Matthew Grimley