SMI Council, 2024-27

The current membership of the Council of the Society for Musicology in Ireland for 2024-27 is as follows: 

	Professor Wolfgang Marx (President) lectures in Historical Musicology at the School of Music, University College Dublin. He is also a member of the UCD Humanities Institute. His main research interests include György Ligeti, the representation of death in music, post-truth and music, and the theory of musical genres. He is general editor of the Death in History, Culture and Society book series by Brill Publishers. Wolfgang has been Head of School at UCD on three occasions and has also served as Honorary Secretary of Ireland’s Council of Heads of Music in Higher Education. In 2005-2012 he was on the editorial board of the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (including three years as executive editor); from 2002 to 2012 he was co-editor of the journal Frankfurter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft. See people.ucd.ie/wolfgang.marx
	Dr Hannah Millington (Honorary Secretary) is a Research Assistant at TU Dublin Conservatoire, where she works with the Junior Musicianship team and the Research Foundation for Music in Ireland. She is also a research supervisor at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and provides library support at the Contemporary Music Centre. She completed her PhD at Dublin City University in March 2024; her thesis addresses the early vocal and choral works of Dame Ethel Smyth from a biographical perspective. Hannah’s broader research interests include women's networks; women’s biographies; vocal works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the relationship between music and literature. Hannah has contributed to the Society for Musicology in Ireland since January 2020, first as the part-time administrator (2020–21) and then as the Student Representative (2021–24). See hnjmillington.com
	Dr Kerry Houston (Honorary Treasurer) is Head of Academic Studies at TU Dublin Conservatoire, Director of the Research Foundation for Music in Ireland, and a former President of the SMI (2012-15). His research interests, which have focused primarily in the field of source studies, particularly for sacred music in England and Ireland in the period 1660-1900, have led to numerous publications including contributions to Irish Musical Studies volumes 6 and 10 (2001 and 2009), the Encylopedia of Music in Ireland (2013), and three chapters concerning music in John Crawford & Raymond Gillespie (eds), Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin: a History (2009). Kerry was co-editor (with Maria McHale and Michael Murphy) of Documents of Irish Music History in the Long Nineteenth Century (Irish Musical Studies, vol. 12, 2019). See www.tudublin.ie/.../drkerryhouston
	Dr Barbara Dignam (Honorary Membership Secretary) is Assistant Professor of Music at Dublin City University. Her research explores intersections of music, language, technology and culture with a particular focus on contemporary music in Ireland and music education. She was co-principal investigator on the awarding-winning Erasmus+ project PRESTO (2021-2023), for which she developed a suite of multimedia resources for visualizing vocal sound in choral and educational contexts using spectrographic technology. She was co-editor of and a contributor to Creative Impulses, Cultural Accents: Brian Boydell’s Music, Advocacy, Painting and Legacy (University College Dublin, 2021) and has also contributed to Irish Musical Studies (2014 and 2022) and to journals including TEMPO (2017), the Journal of Music (2018) and the International Journal for Academic Development (2023). Barbara's forthcoming publications include a co-authored chapter for the second volume of Studies in Irish Music Education. She has served on past SMI Councils and, most recently, as Chair of the subcommittee for SMI Grants. See www.dcu.ie/.../barbara-dignam
	Dr Adam Behan, a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge, is a musicologist who works on western music in the twentieth century, both classical and popular, with particular interests in recordings and cultural history. He is currently an IRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Maynooth University, where he is writing a book about Irish popular music at the end of the twentieth century. His research has won awards including the Karl Geiringer Scholarship from the American Brahms Society and the Westrup Prize from the Music & Letters Trust. His work appears or is forthcoming in several journals, including Music Analysis, Twentieth-Century Music, Music & Letters, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. See www.maynoothuniversity.ie/people/adam-behan
	Kevin Boushel (Student Representative) is a Government of Ireland Scholar at Dublin City University researching stylistic trends in contemporary American choral music. His thesis seeks to explore the under-researched style of New Transcendentalism most commonly associated with Eric Whitacre and other contemporary composers in the USA. His other research interests include twentieth-century American and Irish music, nationalism in music, and choral education. Kevin is the founding director of the DCU Chamber Choir and was the Associate Conductor of the UCD School of Music in 2022-24. As a baritone, he has performed on international tours with the Palestrina Choir, The New Liszt Academy Choir, and Fir an Chladaigh. He has previously served on the Executive Committee of Conradh na Gaeilge and has been a broadcaster on Dublin's Raidió na Life 106.4FM.
	Dr Hazel Farrell is programme leader of the BA (Hons) Music degree at South East Technological University (SUTU). Her research focuses on technology-enhanced student engagement initiatives. She is a founder member of the SETU research group CASE (Creative Approaches to Student Engagement) and her recent publications include “Re-imagining student engagement in an AI-enhanced classroom: Strategies and practices” (in Using AI effectively in HE: Sustainable and ethical practices for teaching, learning and assessment, Routledge, 2024), and “Pseudo-Research: A Fabricated Study on Student Engagement in Music Pedagogy” (2023) in the Irish Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning. Hazel is currently leading the N-TUTORR Gen AI National Network Project for SETU and also leads the university's Sustainability in the Arts Festival. See www.setu.ie/staff/hazel-farrell
	Dr Nicole Grimes is Associate Professor in Music at Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses at the intersection between German music criticism, analysis and aesthetics from the late eighteenth century to the present. She is currently working on a multi-year project called “The Expansive Canvas: Large-Scale Form in the Music of Women Composers”. She is the General Editor of the New Cambridge Music Handbooks; a member of the editorial boards of Music Analysis (since 2015) and the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (since 2024); and a member of the advisory boards of the Women in Global Music Network (WIGM), Irish Musical Studies, and the Institute of Austrian and German Music Research. Her monograph Brahms’s Elegies: The Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2019) was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2022 Danijela Kulezic-Wilson Book Prize of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, and was one of nine Notable Music Books of 2019 selected by Alex Ross of the New Yorker. See nicolegrimes.org
	Dr Helen Lawlor lectures in Irish music, music education, and musicology at the TU Dublin Conservatoire. Her research, with a particular focus on the musical practice, education and history of the harp, is grounded in the discipline of ethnomusicology while drawing also on performance practice and musicological methodologies. She is author of Irish Harping 1900–2010 (2012) and co-editor, with Sandra Joyce, of Harp Studies: Perspectives on the Irish Harp (2016) and Harp Studies II: World Harp Traditions (2024). Her work is also published in The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland, Ancestral Imprints, Sonus, the American Harp Journal, and other journals. Helen is Executive Editor of the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland and Secretary of Performance Research Ireland. She is an advisory board member of Irish Musical Studies and previously served as Chair of the Irish national committee of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM Ireland). Her current research engages with the song sheet collection housed at the Princess Grace Irish Library, Monaco. Initially funded by an IRC New Foundations Award, this is a collaborative project between the TU Dublin Conservatoire, The Princess Grace Irish Library and the Rainier III Académie, Monaco. Other ongoing projects include Sounding Empowerment, an edited collection of essays co-edited with Adrian Scahill, and Access and Participation in Traditional Music, a special issue of Ethnomusicology Ireland. See www.tudublin.ie/.../helenlawlor
	Dr Maria McHale is a lecturer in musicology at TU Dublin Conservatoire. Her research interests lie in musical culture in Ireland and Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She was Executive Editor for the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (2013). Other publications include Documents of Irish Music History in the Long Nineteenth Century (2019), a volume she co-edited with Kerry Houston and Michael Murphy; a chapter for Opera and British Print Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century (2023) edited by Christina Fuhrmann and Alison Mero; and a chapter on Elizabeth Maconchy for a forthcoming volume of the Cambridge University Press Composers in Context series. She has served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (2019–24) and was appointed to the Advisory Board for Irish Musical Studies in 2020. See www.tudublin.ie/.../conservatoire/.../drmariamchale
	Dr Aidan Thomson was appointed Senior Lecturer at NUI Galway in 2018, where he is the head of Ireland’s newest university music department and programme convener of the BA in Music. Previously he was Lecturer in Music at Queen’s University Belfast in 2003–18, and chaired the committee for the 2017 SMI Plenary Conference held at Queen’s. He has served before on SMI Council, from 2012 to 2018 (as Honorary Secretary, 2012–15), and was Reviews Editor of the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (2012–17). His research and publications are concerned with early twentieth-century British and Irish music, particularly that of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Bax and Smyth. Aidan co-edited, with Alain Frogley, The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and is an Associate of the Research Foundation for Music in Ireland. See www.nuigalway.ie/...aidanthomson