Professor Simon Keegan-Phipps

As a passionate advocate for teaching and research that explores music from a range of scholarly perspectives, I'm especially proud to be Head of a Department that boasts such a uniquely diverse variety of approaches to the challenges of understanding, facilitating and creating music. My own work is within the subdiscipline of Ethnomusicology, via which I specialize in the field of contemporary English folk and traditional music.

I've published on the ways in which the English folk arts relate to English national identity, with a particular interest in how they are taught, institutionalized and performed in non-traditional contexts. The ways I teach and research therefore involve frequent sojourns in media and communication studies, education theory, critical and cultural theory, politics and sociology.

I graduated in 2002 with a BA in Music from Durham University, where I was subsequently awarded an MA by Research in Ethnomusicology in 2003. After receiving a Doctoral Award from the AHRC, I completed a PhD in Ethnomusicology at Newcastle University in 2008, with a thesis entitled Teaching Folk; the Educational Institutionalization of Folk Music in Contemporary England. From 2007-9 I worked as the Project Researcher on the AHRC funded project Performing Englishness in New English Folk Music and Dance at the University of Sunderland.

I then came to the University of Sheffield as a Teaching Fellow in Ethnomusicology from 2009, before becoming a Lecturer in 2012, and Senior Lecturer in 2017. I’ve previously held roles as Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music, and the Department’s Director of Learning and Teaching, and took up the role of Head of Department in 2018.