Simon Fleming
Honorary Research Fellow

Profile

Biography

Simon D. I. Fleming’s research focuses on musical culture in eighteenth-century Britain and the wider British world, with particular interests in regional music-making, music publishing and subscription networks, Anglo-Indian musical culture, and the social history of music.

He is the author of The Musical World of Charles Avison: Melodic Charm and the Powers of Harmony (Routledge, 2025), and is currently completing a second monograph entitled Musical Culture in Calcutta 1780–1815: A Colonial Microcosm of British Musical Life. He has also co-edited several volumes, including Music by Subscription: Composers and their Networks in the British Music-Publishing Trade, 1676–1820 (Routledge, 2022) and The Music Trade in Regional Britain, 1650–1800 (Boydell, 2025). He furthermore co-produced the Dataset of Subscribers to Eighteenth-Century Music Publications, a digital humanities project that documents the subscription lists attached to every British music publications issued before 1820 (https://musicsubscribers.co.uk/).

His articles have appeared in journals including The Musical Times, Early Music, Eighteenth-Century Music, The Consort, and the Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle. He has also contributed essays to Women and Music in the Age of Austen (Bucknell, 2023), Data Visualization in Enlightenment Literature and Culture (Springer, 2021), and Music in North-East England, 1500–1800 (Boydell, 2020). Current research projects include the musical culture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Bombay and Madras; the role of Handel’s music within the soundscape of the British Empire; and the ownership of musical scores during the Georgian era.