Dr Matthew Williams
Lecturer in Music

Profile

Biography

Matthew Williams studied for his PhD in musicology at the University of Bristol. His thesis was titled: Sacred-Secular, Gospel-Pop Crossovers. Matthew is especially interested in the field of popular music and religion, specifically utilising Peircean semiotic theory to study meaning-making in music. Matthew’s performance career informs his research, having toured several countries professionally.

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 has taught a variety of undergraduate and MA courses and modules, including musicology, African American Music, Intertextuality and MA Black Humanities course.

He has a chapter on gospel-pop crossovers under contract with Routledge Press in a book entitled Black British Gospel Music from the Windrush Generation to Black Lives Matter, edited by Monique Ingalls, Dulcie Dixon-McKenzie and Pauline Muir.

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

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

Publications

Selected publications

Selected publications, Articles, Books and Reviews

• Book chapter: ‘The Interplay of Sacred and Secular within Gospel Music Performance’ in Black British Gospel Music from the Windrush Generation to Black Lives Matter. Edited by Monique Ingalls, Dulcie Dixon-McKenzie and Pauline Muir. London: Routledge Press. (forthcoming, 2024).
• 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)
• 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
• Article: "Not Secular: Interrogating the Sacred-Secular Binary through Gospel-Pop Performance" Religions 14, no. 9: 1178. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14091178
• Book: Gospel-Pop Crossovers: Secularisation and the Sacred (under contract with Oxford University Press)

Conference Papers and Conference Organisation

• Detroit’s Amen Corner: The Crossing of ‘Sacred and Secular’ Boundaries, Society for American Music, Detroit (forthcoming March 2024)
• NCEM Pre-Concert Lecture on the Spirituals, Reginald Mobley and Baptiste Trotignon (June 2023) 
• Organisation of 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)
• Organisation of Black British Music: Sacred and Secular Study Day (forthcoming March 2023) University of Bristol. Co-organised with Justin Williams, Monique Ingalls and Natalie Hyacinth
• Organisation of 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’ Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives Conference (2021)Ripon College, University of Oxford, UK
• Co-hosted ‘Postgraduates Knowledge Sharing Session’ Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives Conference (2021)Ripon College, University of Oxford, UK
• ‘Sonic Resistance and the Sound of Black British Gospel’ Does Black Christian Music Matter? Conference (2020)Centre for Black Theology, Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham, UK
• ‘The Legacy of the Windrush Generation in Black British Music’ Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives (2019)Ripon College, University of Oxford, UK

Teaching

Undergraduate

• BA Critical Thinking and Listening
• History of African-American Music

Postgraduate

• MA Critical Musicology: Theories and Approaches
• PhD student supervision – ongoing