Janieke Bruin-Mollenhorst
is a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University Medical Center, IQ Health Science Department, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She studies ethical aspects related to end-of-life care for people with dementia in the Netherlands. Previously, she conducted her PhD research on music during contemporary funerals in the Netherlands at the Department of Culture Studies of Tilburg University (The Netherlands). In addition to her dissertation, she has published various articles and book chapters on music and death.
Jonathan Clinch
is an organist and academic. Since 2018, he has held the post of Lecturer in Academic Studies at the Royal Academy of Music, specialising in British music and culture. He sits on the committees of Musica Britannica, the Herbert Howells Society, and the British Music Society. He was previously Frank Bridge Research Fellow at the Royal College of Music and OCVE Research Associate at Cambridge University. Having completed his PhD on the music of Howells, he has continued to focus predominantly on English music (including Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Parry, Britten, Dyson, Rubbra, Lutyens, Arnold, and Bridge) and is currently editing a book of essays on Frank Bridge and writing a biography of Herbert Howells. Previous work includes a completion of Howells’s Cello Concerto and an edited volume of his piano music which won Presto Music’s award for New Publication of the Year 2021. He released a digital album of organ works by J.S.Bach and the contemporary British composer Robert Saxton in October 2022.
Douglas J. Davies
is Professor in the Study of Religion at Durham University and Director of the Centre for Death and Life Studies. His major monographs include Death, Ritual and Belief (3rd ed., 2017), Mors Britannica (2015), Emotion, Identity and Religion (2011), and Theology of Death (2008). He was Series Editor for the six-volume Cultural History of Death (2024) and is an elected Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences, The Learned Society of Wales, and The British Academy. He has also received a Lifetime Achievement Award (2025) from Association for the Study of Death and Society.
Benjamin Goodman
is a British-Israeli pianist, studying for a doctorate at the Royal College of Music, London, where he holds an RCM Studentship Scholarship. He has a
Thomas Anthony Graves
has recently attained his PhD in Music from Durham University. Combining the methods of ethnomusicology and music psychology, his research investigates the emotional experiences of listeners to qawwālī at Sufi shrines in India. His research interests encompass the psychology, anthropology, and philosophy of musical emotion, South Asian musics, music and Islam, and epistemologies of multidisciplinary music research. He currently works for Enlighten, the institutional research repository at the University of Glasgow.
Erin Johnson-Williams
is Associate Professor in Music Education and Social Justice at the University of Southampton. Her research focuses on decolonizing the nineteenth century, the imperial legacies of music education, trauma studies, gender and maternity, and biopolitics. Erin is co-editor of Intersectional Encounters in the Nineteenth-Century Archive (2022), Hymns and Constructions of Race: Mobility, Agency, De/Coloniality (2024), and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism.
Daithí Kearney
is an ethnomusicologist, geographer, and performer, as well as a lecturer in music, theatre, and tourism and co-director of the Creative Arts Research Centre at Dundalk Institute of Technology. He is widely published in academic books and journals, as well as being a published poet and songwriter, commissioned composer, and experienced performer. Albums include A Louth Lilt (2017), featuring new compositions with his wife Dr Adèle Commins. In 2023, Daithí was the recipient of the DKIT President’s Prize for Established Researcher in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and a Bardic Award from Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann for contribution to Irish traditional music.
Wolfgang Marx
is Professor of Musicology at University College Dublin (UCD) and a member of the UCD Humanities Institute. Amongst his research interests are the representation of death in music (particularly in requiem compositions), György Ligeti, music and post-truth, and the theory of musical genres. Recent
Matthew McCullough
is a musicologist specialising in British music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular interests in death, trauma, and memory. He is an Associate Fellow of Van Mildert College and sits on the advisory board of the Centre for Death and Life Studies. He completed his PhD in Musicology and Analysis in 2024 with a thesis on British composers’ musical responses to the First World War, and is co-editor of the four-volume series Death, Loss, Memory and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1780–1914 (Routledge, 2025).
Maximilian Rosenthal
is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Musicology/Sound Studies at the University of Bonn. He obtained his PhD in Musicology at the University of Music FRANZ LISZT in Weimar in 2021 with a thesis on the music dedicated to Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (published 2023, Königshausen & Neumann). After his PhD, he was project manager of the DFG-research project “Geschmacksbildung und Verlagspolitik” at the University of Music and Theatre “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” in Leipzig from 2020 to 2023. His research focusses on 19th- and 20th-century music, especially on Mendelssohn, music publishers, social, economic, and cultural aspects of music history, and music as text; he has also developed a research focus on music in games.