Research interests

• Renaissance music
• Music in interwar France
• Music and gender
• Domestic music in Britain c.1800
• Sound in heritage interpretation

Current research

My current research focussed on a new monograph, At Home with Music: Sounding the Domestic in Georgian Britain, which explores the role of music in material and ideological constructions of home. This research is supported by a major grant (2017-2021) from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with partners from the Royal College of Music, the British Library, the National Trust, Sydney Living Museums and the Buccleuch Living Heritage Trust. As well as historical research, the project seeks to construct imaginative musical interpretations for heritage visitors today. I have co-curated an exhibition at Boughton House (A Passion for Opera: The Duchess and the Georgian Stage, 2019) and contributed to Songs of Home at the Museum of Sydney (2019). I am the leader of the international Sound Heritage network, bringing together academic music historians, historic performance specialists, and heritage sector professionals for a collaborative approach to the research and interpretation of music in historic houses. This work has led to a co-edited essay collection, Sound Heritage: Making Music Matter in Historic Houses, published by Routledge in 2021. Films, recordings and interpretation resources from my projects are available at https://sound-heritage.ac.uk/

At undergraduate level, I mainly lead early music courses, including a first-year core course as well as more specialised year two/three modules such as Love in the Renaissance and Jane Austen’s Playlist. I also support many students completing undergraduate and master's research projects, and teach master's courses in research methods and critical practice. In 2022-23, I will launch a new module, Sounding the Museum, building on my work in heritage; this module is open to students from any discipline, and explores how sound and music have been used to interpret objects and histories within the heritage industry.

Currently I supervise up to ten PhD students working on the cultural history of music from the 16th to the 20th centuries. I am is happy to supervise doctoral work in early modern topics, in 20th-century French and British music, on domestic music making around 1800 and in music and gender. I welcome informal approaches from potential master's and PhD students who would like to discuss their interests. I'm also happy to work with potential students to help devise research and funding proposals in advance of application to one of our programmes.

Professor Jeanice Brooks is a cultural historian of music, and Professor of Music at the University of Southampton.

My research interests include music and culture in Renaissance France; musical culture of the mid-twentieth century, especially the career of Nadia Boulanger; domestic music-making in Britain c. 1800; and song and gender. I hold a PhD in musicology with a minor in French literature, and continue to develop interdisciplinary research topics that draw on literary as well as musical sources. My research on domestic music performance and material culture includes projects in collaboration with the National Trust and other heritage bodies.

My book The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future Between the Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2013) uses the case of the famous French pedagogue to explore how modernist concepts of the musical work affected performance culture in the interwar period. My work on Nadia Boulanger has led to two recent edited books, both appearing in 2020: Nadia Boulanger and Her World, in association with the Bard Music Festival (University of Chicago Press) and Nadia Boulanger: Thoughts on Music (University of Rochester Press). In early music, my Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France (Chicago, 2000) – a monograph on music and courtly ideologies in the Renaissance – won the 2001 Roland H Bainton prize for the best book of the year in music or art history. I am currently co-editing the Renaissance volume of the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Western Music (forthcoming 2023). I have published articles in a wide range of journals including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Review of English Studies, Early Music History, Early Music, Revue de musicologie, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Studies and Revue belge de musicologie. From 1999–2004 I was co-editor of Music & Letters, and I led the digital edition of the Austen Family Music Books in 2015.