Please come along to hear what department staff and PhD students have been sharing at academic conferences in Summer 2026, followed by tea and refreshments in the Theatre Bar. All welcome.
Teddy Cooper: ‘Peripheral Sounds, “Plague Logic”, and the Politics of Mundanity in Trans+ Drag Music Cultures’
(Presented at International Association for the Study of Popular Music UK/IRE, Aberdeen in June/July 2026)
Abstract: This paper explores musical manifestations of trans+ individuals becoming increasingly peripheral to public discourse about transness. In public spheres, trans+ bodies are typically presented through crisis narrative frameworks, where they have historically been medicalised, pathologized, sexualised, and problematised. Queer artistic responses to homophobia and transphobia remain crucial in how crisis is communicated. I situate musical responses to the current trans+ genocide in a queer lineage of musical responses to homophobia and transphobia through a case study of musical responses to the AIDS pandemic, 1981-1996, building on Matthew J. Jones’s work on recorded pop music to include pop in other grassroots and protest settings (2024). I demonstrate how music operates within a core-periphery regime; complicit in societal crisis narratives which demand certain musical features (volume, clarity, repetition) whilst marginalising quieter, affective, and mundane sonic modes of trans+ embodiment and connection (I term this ‘plague logic’).
I argue for reclaiming mundanity as a rich and overlooked sonic register, which combats the musical restraints of plague logic and challenges dominant frameworks of (mis)understanding trans+ bodies. Using ethnographic material from Bristol’s drag scene to highlight music as an affective strategy in grassroots drag, I contrast musical permutations of the mundanity of trans+ embodiment with trans+ bodies in crisis. In drag, mundanity is articulated through genre promiscuity, music without symbolic gravitas, affective warmth and intimacy. Music becomes a site of radical care. I reposition drag as a sonic ecology with multiple modes of embodiment coexisting; through music, drag performance enables privacy in public spheres. Sound allows trans+ bodies to be present and centred through foregrounding temporal qualities, affective resonance, listening as relational. By centring mundanity within trans+ drag, this paper reframes peripherality as a productive site of care and alternative music value, contributing to broader discussions of how peripheral sonic practices resist dominant crisis narratives.
Teddy Cooper is a doctoral candidate at the University of Bristol, working across popular music, trans+ studies, and drag performance. Their doctoral project investigates how trans-coded musical performance in queer spaces shapes both individual and collective experiences of transness at drag shows in Bristol. Using a queer ethnographic methodology, Teddy centres trans+ voices and experiences through participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and artistic collaboration, alongside analytical work on pop and dance tracks. Across their work, Teddy engages closely with queer-feminist organising, community-building, and creative, collaborative methods. Teddy is funded by the AHRC’s South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership and is jointly supervised by Professor Justin Williams (Musicology) at the University of Bristol and Professor Jana Funke (English and Sexuality Studies) at the University of Exeter. Teddy holds a BA in Music from the University of Bristol and an MPhil in Music from the University of Cambridge, St. Edmund’s College.
Cassandra Fenton: ‘Towards a Network Analysis of English Pontifical Chants’
(Presented at Leeds International Medieval Congress, July 2026)
Abstract: In this paper, I discuss the potential applications of network analysis in assessing transmission relationships between English pontifical manuscripts produced up to the thirteenth century. Due to the variability of liturgical content in early pontificals, there has been considerable debate on how these manuscripts should be defined and studied. My goal for the wider project is to approach the pontificals through their notated musical content: with over 1200 individual instances of notation, there is a vast repertoire of notated chants, in which patterns of melodic transmission do not always correspond to patterns to those of textual transmission. Considering the complex relationship between textual and melodic concordance, I discuss the methodological challenges in quantifying similarity in early medieval chants and explore how network analysis tools such as Gephi can be used to visualise these musical relationships.
Cassandra Fenton is a final year PhD researcher in music at the University of Bristol, where she is researching notated chants in English pontifical manuscripts produced between the 10th and 13th centuries. Her research is supervised by Prof. Emma Hornby, co-supervised the University of Exeter, and funded by the South, West, and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. Alongside her research, Cassandra is an active member of Bristol’s Centre for Medieval Studies and the Royal Musical Association student committee, through which she serves as the student representative for the EDI working group. This past spring, she was part of the inaugural cohort for the UKRI-wide AI and EDI training project: ‘Supporting the Next Generation of Arts and Humanities Research Leaders,' where she continued to expand her digital humanities training.
Sarah Hibberd: ‘Being Rubini: the Sound of Heroism’
(Presented at France: Musiques, Cultures conference, Venice June 2026)
Abstract: For the London critic Henry Chorley, ‘there never was an artist who seemed so thoroughly and intensely to enjoy his own singing’ than the Italian tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini (1794–1854). But the flip side of the coin was that ‘he rarely tried to act’ and was ‘surpassed by everyone in his declamation’. He has subsequently been understood as the quintessential Rossinian tenor – defined by pure sound and emotion. Yet he was also to be remembered for creating some of Bellini’s and Donizetti’s most memorable heroes, and Parisian critics offered a very different view, hearing and seeing complexity and intelligence in his characterisations. Why was there such a distinction between Rubini’s London and Paris reception? How did it relate to the sound of his voice on the one hand, and the expectations of audiences in these two cities on the other? As Heather Hadlock has observed, ‘multiple masculinities’ were on offer as the modern tenor emerged from the disappearance of the castrato in the first third of the century. I consider the roles created for Rubini in this light, paying particular attention to assessments of his high register in the years just before Gilbert Duprez famously unleashed his chest high at a performance of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell in 1837 – a sound that was quickly mythologised as embodying the new virile profile of tenors. I conclude by situating these characters and Rubini’s voice in the context of perceptions of heroism in 1830s Paris.
Sarah Hibberd is Stanley Hugh Badock Chair of Music at Bristol. Her research focuses on opera in Paris, London and Naples during the first half of the nineteenth century, and her publications include French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, 2009), a guest-edited special issue of 19th-Century Music ‘Music and Science in London and Paris’ (2015), and Berlioz and His World, co-edited with Francesca Brittan (Chicago, 2024). She has just finished a book on French Opera and the Revolutionary Sublime and is working on a group of Italian opera singers known as the Puritani Quartet. She is co-editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal.