Paul Watt

Paul Watt is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Elder Conservatorium of Music at the University of Adelaide. His research on British musical cultures spans the eighteenth century to the present and includes two monographs, Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography (2017) and The Regulation and Reform of Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century England (2018). He has guest edited a range of themed journals including on music criticism (with Sarah Collins, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 2017) and street music in the Journal of Musicological Research (2018) and Nineteenth-Century Music Review (2018). Paul has also published on British music in Music & Letters, the RMA Research Chronicle and the Yale Journal of Music & Religion, and edited collections. These include Bawdy Songs of the Romantic Period (edited with Patrick Spedding, 2011); Joseph Holbrooke: Composer, Critic, and Musical Patriot (with Anne-Marie Forbes, 2015), and The Symphonic Poem in Britain, 1850–1950 (with Michael Allis, 2020). Watt also works on musical biography as well as literary, intellectual, social and religious history. In 2020 he was co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (with Sarah Collins and Michael Allis) and is co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Musical Biography and Life-Writing (with Christopher Wiley). Current projects include a monograph, Music, Moral Education and Social Reform in the Nineteenth Century and a critical edition of the autobiography and selected musical critic of Herbert Thompson (with Michael Allis).

Paul Watt is a speaker at the Diversity and the British String Quarter Symposium, taking place from the 14-16 June 2021. Full details of the programme can be found here:  Diversity and the British String Quartet Symposium.