Dr Matthew Williams
Lecturer in Music

Profile

Biography

Matthew Williams studied for his PhD in musicology at the University of Bristol supervised by Dr Justin Williams and Professor Emma Hornby. His thesis was titled Sacred-Secular, Gospel-Pop Crossovers. Matthew is especially interested in popular music and religion, specifically utilising semiotics to study meaning-making in music. Matthew worked as a secondary school music teacher for ten years. During the same period, he undertook an MA in Music (passed with distinction) and studied for his PhD.

He has been an external tutor in music at the University of Oxford and has also worked as an assistant tutor at the University of Bristol. He currently teaches at undergraduate and masters level on a variety of topics including History of African American Music, Semiotics, Critical Thinking and Listening, Music of the Afro-Atlantic, and Musicology. He also supervises PhDs on a range of topics related to his research interests.

Matthew is currently working on a monograph (under contract with Oxford University Press) titled Gospel-Pop Crossovers: Secularisation and the Sacred.

School Roles

Undergraduate Admissions Tutor

Future Voices Scholarship Mentor

Research

Overview

• Popular Music and Religion
• Music of the Afro-Atlantic
• Theology and Musical Borrowing
• Semiotics and Music’s Meanings
• Secularisation
• Intertextuality
• Metamodernism and Music

Matthew welcomes enquiries from PhD candidates interested in any of these research areas.

Publications

Selected publications

Publications

• Book: Gospel-Pop Crossovers: Secularisation and the Sacred (under contract with Oxford University Press)
• Gospel in Pop and Genre Codes (book chapter forthcoming OUP Handbook of Popular Music)
• Article: "Not Secular: Interrogating the Sacred-Secular Binary through Gospel-Pop Performance" Religions 14, no. 9: 1178. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14091178
• Book review: ‘The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality. By Nina Sun Eidsheim’. In Popular Music, Cambridge University Press 40(3-4): 538-540. (2022).
• Book chapter: ‘Black British Gospel-Pop Crossover’ in Black British Gospel Music. Edited by Monique Ingalls, Dulcie Dixon-McKenzie and Pauline Muir. London: Routledge Press (2024).
• Public facing - Stormzy: This Is What I Mean – spirituality takes centre stage on the artist’s new album, The Conversation (2022). https://theconversation.com/stormzy-this-is-what-i-mean-spirituality-takes-centre-stage-on-the-artists-new-album-196251

Conference Papers 

• Detroit’s Amen Corner: The Crossing of ‘Sacred and Secular’ Boundaries, Society for American Music, Detroit (March 2024)
• YorkTalk – ‘Above Us Only Sky: Spirituality in Popular Music Challenges Predictions that We are Trapped in an Age of Disenchantment’ (Jan 2024)
• NCEM Pre-Concert Lecture on the Spirituals, Reginald Mobley and Baptiste Trotignon (June 2023) 
• Music and Ideas of the Popular, Online Symposium hosted by NABMSA (August 2023)
• ‘Toward a Semiotic Theory for Gospel Music’ ICTM World Conference, University of Ghana, (July 2023)
• ‘Andraé Crouch and the “Gospel Sound”: Gospel Codes in Pop Music’ Pruit Memorial Symposium, Baylor University, Texas (15 – 17 March 2023)
• Black British Music: Sacred and Secular Study Day (March 2023) University of Bristol. Co-organised with Justin Williams, Monique Ingalls and Natalie Hyacinth
• Amazing Grace - Legacies at 250 Conference (July 2022) Hosted by the Open University at the Cowper and Newton Museum, Olney. Co-organized with Martin Clarke, Nancy Cho and Gareth Atkins
• ‘Stormzy and the Evocation of the Transcendent’ Spirituality and Genre Study Day (May 2022) Middlesex University, London
• ‘Stormzy and the Re-enchantment of our Secular Age’ North American British Music Studies Association Conference (July 2022) Illinois State University, USA
• ‘Secularisation and Gospel Codes’ CCM: Local and Global Perspectives Conference (2021) Ripon College, University of Oxford, UK
• ‘Sonic Resistance and the Sound of Black British Gospel’ (2020) Centre for Black Theology, Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham, UK
• ‘The Legacy of the Windrush Generation in Black British Music’ CCM Local and Global Perspectives (2019) Ripon College, University of Oxford, UK

Teaching

Undergraduate

• BA Critical Thinking and Listening
• Music’s Meanings - Semiotics
• History of African American Music
• Music of the Afro-Atlantic

Postgraduate

• MA Music
• PhD student Supervision – ongoing