Dr Philip Burnett
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Profile

Biography

Philip Burnett is a music historian and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Arts and Creative Technologies. His research specialises in the musical practices found on mission stations in subequatorial Africa during the long nineteenth century. He is interested in the people and things that made music happen and the relationships that formed around musical practices. His current project ‘Singing from the Same Hymn Sheet’ uses a comparison of missionary hymn repertoires in parts of South Africa, Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zanzibar to compare how mission culture and identity formed, and how it was shaped by language, local cultures, and the form and content of hymnbooks produced between the 1870s and 1920s.

He studied at Rhodes University, South Africa, and the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. His research has been published in South African Music Studies (SAMUS), Postcolonial Studies, and in several edited volumes. He is currently
working on a monograph about missionary musical cultures in southern and East Africa during the long nineteenth century.

Research

Overview

• Music and Mission
• Post/De-Colonialism and Music
• Musicology and Archives
• British music history outside Britain

Publications

Selected publications

Published/In Press

• Burnett, Philip (2025b), ‘Book Review: Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Music & Letters, https://academic.oup.com/ml/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ml/gcaf085/8240818
• Burnett, Philip (2025a), ‘Understanding Colonial Mission Hymns and Hybridity’, in Reading Texts in Music and Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, eds Phyllis Welliver and Katharine Ellis (Boydell), 91–104.
• Johnson-Williams, Erin and Burnett, Philip (2024), Hymns and Constructions of Race: Mobility, Agency, De/coloniality (Routledge).
• Burnett, Philip, Erin Johnson-Williams, and Yvonne Liao (2023), ‘Special Issue: Music, Empire, Colonialism: Sounding the Archives: Introduction’, Postcolonial Studies 26:3, 345–59.
• Burnett, Philip (2023), ‘Resonating Across an Anglican-Xhosa Mission Soundscape: A Case Study of Instruments, Bells, and Processions’, Postcolonial Studies 26:3, 406–32.

Submitted/Under Contract

• Burnett, Philip (2025), ‘Colonial Mission Music and Anglican Missions in the Nineteenth-Century Eastern Cape, South Africa’, in The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism, eds Erin Johnson–Williams, Roe–Min Kok, and Yvonne Liao (Oxford University Press).