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Prof Emma Sutton

Professor

Phone

+44 (0)1334 46 2676

Email

ess2@st-andrews.ac.uk

Office

Room 005

Location

Kennedy Hall

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Biography

Emma Sutton studied English at the Universities of Exeter and Leeds before taking her PhD, funded by the British Academy, on late nineteenth-century literature, visual art and opera at the University of Cambridge. After several years teaching at Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities she joined �Ӱ���̳ in 2003. She is Professor of English and an Associate of the UK’s Centre for Pacific Studies. In 2024, she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She is giving the 2025 Gordon B. Hinckley Lecture in British Studies, and between 2025-2027 will be taking up a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for the project 'Hearing the Pacific: Robert Louis Stevenson and Musical Cultures in Colonial Oceania'.

Research areas

My principal research interest is musical-literary relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the ways in which music informed writers’ formal experimentation and their politics. This work has three main strands.

The first is music and Decadence, particularly the work of the British artist and writer Aubrey Beardsley and the reception of Richard Wagner’s operas and prose among Decadent writers and visual artists in the fin de siècle. Publications on this subject include Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford University Press, 2002). This research informed events for public audiences: BBC Proms broadcasts (including, with Simon Russell Beale, for Wagner’s Ring cycle conducted by Daniel Barenboim); in 2014 at the Moscow Conservatoire and the Pushkin Museum (broadcast Moscow 24 TV); and the catalogue essay on music for the 2020 Aubrey Beardsley exhibition at Tate Britain / the Musée��d'Orsay.

A second interest is in music and modernist writing, particularly the work of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. I have been a board member of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf since its inception in 2006 and am editing The Voyage Out for that scholarly edition. In 2013 I published Virginia Woolf and Classical Music (Edinburgh University Press) and, in 2014, Anglo-American pianist Lana Bode and I established the AHRC-funded . I edited, with Michael Downes, the FMLS Special Issue Opera and the Novel (2012) and, with Tsung-Han Tsai, the first book-length study (2020) of Forster's novel Maurice.��

More recently, my research focuses on music’s role in the colonial history of Oceania. In 2018, colleagues at National University of Samoa and I established an ongoing collaboration on (SFC-GCRF funded); this project is led by Susau Solomona, producing educational resources and new creative works for public audiences from primary school to HE level. In tandem with this work, I am writing a study of the networks of Hawai‘ian, Sāmoan and i-Kiribati musicians with whom Scottish writer and amateur composer Robert Louis Stevenson made music in the 1880s and 1890s.

I have supervised more than twenty-five doctoral students (funded by SGSAH, the AHRC, ESSE and the Carnegie Trust), and would be pleased to consider research applications in the areas described above.

PhD supervision

• Nat��Bartels
• Mara��Curechian
• Valery��Goutorova
• Rachael��Stark

Selected publications and performances

• Sutton, E. S., 26 Mar 2021

  Research output: Non-textual form › Web publication/site

• Sutton, E. S., 20 May 2021, Song beyond the nation : translation, transnationalism and performance. Bullock, P. R. & Tunbridge, L. (eds.). Oxford: The British Academy, p. 254-268 12 p. (Proceedings of the British Academy; vol. 236).

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Open access
  Sutton, E., Oct 2020, Decadence: A literary history. Murray, A. (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 218-233

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Sutton, E., Feb 2020, Aubrey Beardsley exhibition book. Calloway, S. & Corbeau-Parsons, C. (eds.). Tate Publishing, p. 32-37

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Williams, B., Bates, C. R. (Other) & Sutton, E. S. (Other), 19 Feb 2020

  Research output: Non-textual form › Performance

• Sutton, E. S., 1 Jun 2020, Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace: Transnational Circulations . Mildenberg, A. & Novillo-Corvalán, P. (eds.). Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, Vol. 1. p. 33-48 16 p. (Virginia Woolf selected papers).

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Sutton, E. S., 1 Jul 2020, The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music. da Sousa Correa, D. (ed.). Edinburgh University Press, p. 544-551 8 p.

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Sutton, E. S. (Editor) & Tsai, T.-H. (Editor), 31 Mar 2020, Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press. 296 p. (Liverpool English Texts and Studies)

  Research output: Book/Report › Book

• Open access
  Sutton, E. S., 1 Aug 2019, Decadence and Literature. Desmarais, J. & Weir, D. (eds.). Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, Vol. 1. p. 152-168 (Cambridge Critical Concepts).

  Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

• Sutton, E. S., 1 Dec 2019, (In preparation) Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf)

  Research output: Book/Report › Book

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