Dear all,
Matt Ingleby and I have secured a fully-funded, 4-year PhD studentship with the Museum of the Home on music and lived experiences in non-elite English homes, 1780-1870.
Please do share with anyone you think might be interested:
Alastair (and Matt)
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AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) studentship
Soundscapes of domesticity: music and lived experiences in non-elite English homes, 1780–1870
Queen Mary University of London with the Museum of the Home
The deadline for applications is: 1700 BST, Friday 23 May 2025
Interviews will be held during the week commencing: Monday 2 June 2025
Queen Mary University of London and the Museum of the Home are pleased to announce the availability of a fully-funded Collaborative Doctoral Studentship from October 2025 under the AHRC's Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) scheme. The studentship is funded for four years full-time, or up to eight years part-time.
Project overview and key aims
This project will explore the significance of music to lived experiences in non-elite English homes from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing on examples of different types of home from working-class cottages to petit-bourgeois households, lodging houses and institutional homes, it aims to provide understanding of the role played by music in relation to three key areas of domestic experience: (i) how music was entwined with embodied domestic practices and how it shaped expressive responses, emotional capacities and movement within the home; (ii) how music enabled and sustained familial relationships and other domestic social interactions; and (iii) how music connected homes to the places around them, and the commercial, social, cultural and political networks of the wider world.
Alongside a PhD thesis presenting original new research on a neglected area of historical and musicological investigation, the findings of the project will contribute to the Museum of the Home's redisplay of its eighteenth and earlier nineteenth-century period rooms. The production of musical soundtracks for museum visitors and the organisation of a 'Festival-Symposium' on 'Music in the Home', with contributions from researchers, curators and musicians, will be additional outputs.
This project will be jointly supervised by Alastair Owens (Professor of Historical Geography), and Matthew Ingleby (Lecturer in Victorian Literature) at Queen Mary; and, at the Museum of the Home, by Louis Platman (Curator and Research Manager) and Gaynor Tutani (Creative Programming Officer).
Click here for further details and the application process.
For enquiries, or an informal discussion, please contact Alastair Owens (a.j.owens@qmul.ac.uk)
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Professor of Historical Geography and Director of Education
Chair of Trustees, The Geographical Association
School of Geography | Queen Mary University of London | Mile End Road | London | E1 4NS | UK
How to contact me:
Telephone: 0776 560 1782 | Email: a.j.owens@qmul.ac.uk | Using Microsoft Teams? Click here to chat with me |X: @AlastairHackney |Bluesky: @alastairhackney.bsky.social
Recent work:
At home in London during COVID-19: policy recommendations and key findings (Report, 2022)
Anglicanism, race and the inner city: parochial domesticity and anti-racism in the long 1980s (History Workshop Journal 94, 2022)
Working better together: geographers and collaboration (Teaching Geography 48, 2023)
