Carmel Raz is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University and lecturer in the department of music. She received her PhD in music theory from Yale in 2015, and holds a Masters degree in composition from the University of Chicago and a Diplom in violin performance from the Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler” in Berlin. Her primary research interests focus on the music and neural science of the early Romantic period, in particular the influence of different theories of cognition on musical works, instrument design, and aesthetics. She is also interested in the influence of Common Sense philosophy on music theory in the Scottish Enlightenment, the interaction between experimental music and phonetics in the early twentieth century, and music in the Middle East. Her academic work has been recognized and supported by the Theron Rockwell Field Dissertation Prize, a Whiting Dissertation Fellowship, a Mellon Graduate Achievement Award, and the Baden Württemberg Stiftung. She has published articles in 19th-Century Music, Current Musicology, the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie, and the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies. Her chapters have appeared or are forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination, The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind and Wellbeing: Historical and Scientific Perspectives, and Al-Andalus and its Jewish Diasporas: Musical Exodus.
James Grande completed his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of Oxford, where he was a research assistant on the Leverhulme-funded Godwin Diary Project and wrote his doctoral thesis on the radical journalist William Cobbett. He joined King’s in 2011 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow to work on the politics and aesthetics of religious dissent. Between 2014 and 2016 he was a postdoctoral research fellow on the ERC project Music in London, 1800-1851. His research is focused on the politics and print culture of the Romantic period. His first monograph, William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England: Radicalism and the Fourth Estate, 1792-1835 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) offers a new interpretation of Cobbett as a Burkean radical whose writing cuts across the ‘revolution controversy’ of the 1790s, combining Thomas Paine’s common sense and transatlantic radicalism with Edmund Burke’s emphasis on tradition, patriotism and the domestic affections. James has also co-edited an anthology of Cobbett’s writings and a volume of essays by scholars from literary studies, social history and the history of political thought on Cobbett’s contexts and legacies. His current research project is entitled ‘Articulate Sounds: Music, Dissent and Literary Culture, 1789-1840’ and explores the equivocal place of music within dissenting culture. He is also co-editing a collection of essays on song and scripture in nineteenth-century Britain and is particularly interested in the intersections between literary studies, religious history, musicology and sound studies.