Dr Matthew Williams
Lecturer in Music

Profile

Biography

Matthew’s research focuses on musical meaning, popular music and religion, gospel music and music in the Black Atlantic. His work combines musicological analysis, cultural history, and Peircean semiotics to investigate how music acquires and communicates meaning. A major strand of his research considers how gospel music and its meanings function between sacred and popular settings. He published his first monograph, Gospel Codes in British Popular Music: A Diasporic Call and Response, with Oxford University Press in November 2026. The book examines how musical signs associated with Black gospel traditions operate within British popular culture, exploring questions of diaspora, secularisation, musical borrowing, and cultural meaning. His research in this area also appears in edited collections published by Oxford University Press and Routledge.

In 2026, Matthew held a fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, funded through an AHRC Early Career International Fellowship. His research examined early twentieth-century recordings and documentation of Jamaican music, exploring musical exchange, colonial history and the formation of Afro-Caribbean religious repertoires.

Before joining the University of York in 2022, Matthew taught at the University of Oxford and the University of Bristol and spent ten years teaching music and music technology in secondary education. He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol. His research has been presented internationally, including at the Society for American Music, Society for Ethnomusicology, International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance, British Forum for Ethnomusicology, and the North American British Music Studies Association, as well as invited research presentations at Cambridge, Durham and Bristol.

School Roles

• Deputy Chair, School Research and Practice Committee (2026–27)
• Undergraduate Admissions Tutor (2022–25)

Research

Overview

• Semiotics and music’s meanings
• Music, secularisation and the sacred/secular relationship
• Popular music and religion
• Intertextuality and topic theory
• Music in the Black Atlantic
• Theology and musical borrowing

Matthew welcomes enquiries from prospective postgraduate researchers working in
these and related areas.

Publications

Selected publications

Book

Williams, Matthew A. Gospel Codes in British Popular Music: A Diasporic Call and Response. Oxford University Press, 2026.

Book Chapters

Williams, Matthew A. ‘Gospel Choirs and Topic Theory.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Popular Music. Oxford University Press.

Williams, Matthew A. ‘Aretha, Amazing Grace and the Transcendent.’ In Amazing Grace at 250: Global Heritage and Contested Legacies. Routledge, 2025.

Williams, Matthew A. ‘The Interplay of Sacred and Secular within Gospel Music Performance.’ In Black British Gospel Music: From the Windrush Generation to Black Lives Matter. Routledge, 2024.

Articles and reviews

Williams, Matthew A. ‘Not Secular: Interrogating the Sacred-Secular Binary through Gospel-Pop Performance.’ Religions 14, no. 9 (2023): 1178.

Public Facing - ‘Stormzy: This Is What I Mean – spirituality takes centre stage on the artist’s new album,’ The Conversation

Williams, Matthew A. Review of Nina Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality. Popular Music 40, nos. 3–4 (2022): 538–540.

Selected invited talks and conference papers

Invited talks

• ‘Gospel Choirs and Topic Theory.’ Music Colloquium, Durham University, 2025.
• ‘Semiotic Slippages: A Gospel Sound in British Popular Culture.’ Faculty of Music Colloquium, University of Cambridge, 2025.
• ‘Gospel Codes and Sacred/Secular Binaries.’ University of Bristol, 2024.

Selected conference papers

• ‘Gospel and the Politics of Representation in British Popular Culture.’ Society for Ethnomusicology 70th Annual Meeting, Atlanta, USA, 2025.
• ‘Resonances of the Sacred.’ British Forum for Ethnomusicology Annual Conference, University of Cambridge, 2025.
• ‘Detroit’s Amen Corner: The Crossing of ‘Sacred and Secular’ Boundaries.’ Society for American Music 50th Annual Conference, Detroit, USA, 2024.
• ‘Toward a Semiotic Theory for Gospel Music.’ International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance World Conference, University of Ghana, Accra, 2023.
• ‘Andraé Crouch and the Gospel Sound: Gospel Codes in Pop Music’ Pruit Memorial Symposium, Baylor University, Texas (15 – 17 March 2023)

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Semiotics / Music’s Meanings
• Global History and Music of the African Diaspora
• History of African American Music
• Critical Thinking and Listening

Postgraduate

• MA Musicology
• Research supervision in semiotics, music and religion, popular music studies and music of the Black Atlantic

Other teaching

Matthew teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate Music programmes. His teaching is research-led and includes semiotics, music and religion, critical approaches to musicology, music in the Black Atlantic, and popular music studies.