School of Arts and Creative Technologies
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- Matthew Williams
Dr Matthew Williams
Lecturer in Music
Profile
Biography
Matthew Williams studied for his PhD in music at the University of Bristol. His thesis was titled Sacred-Secular, Gospel-Pop Crossovers. Matthew is especially interested in popular music and religion, specifically utilising Peircean semiotics to study meaning-making in music. Matthew worked as a secondary school music teacher for ten years. During the same period, he undertook an MA in Music (passed with distinction) and studied for his PhD.
He has been an external tutor in music at the University of Oxford and has also worked as an assistant tutor at the University of Bristol. He currently teaches at undergraduate andpostgraduate levels on a variety of topics, including the History of African American Music, Semiotics, Critical Thinking and Listening, African Diasporic musics, and Musicology. He also supervises PhD students on various topics related to his research interests.
Matthew is currently working on a monograph (under contract with Oxford University Press) titled The Gospel Sound in Popular Music: Secularisation and Music's Meanings.
School Roles
Future Voices Scholarship Mentor
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