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

Research

Overview

• Semiotics and Music’s Meanings
• Popular Music and Religion
• Topic theory
  
• African diasporic music studies
  
• Theology and Musical Borrowing
• Secularisation
• Intertextuality

Matthew is currently supervising research students and welcomes enquiries from candidates interested in any of these research areas.

Publications

Selected publications

Publications

• Monograph: The Gospel Sound in Popular Music: Secularisation and Music's Meanings (under contract with Oxford University Press)
• Book chapter: Coldplay, Gospel Choirs and Topic Theory (under contract - Oxford University Press - Handbook of Popular Music)
• Book chapter: 'Amazing Grace' Aretha and the Transcendent in Amazing Grace at 250: Global Heritage and Contested Legacies.  (under contract with Routledge Press (Amazing Grace at 250)) 
  
• Book chapter: ‘Gospel-Pop Crossover’ in Black British Gospel Music. Edited by Monique Ingalls, Dulcie Dixon-McKenzie and Pauline Muir. London: Routledge Press (2024).
• Article: "Not Secular: Interrogating the Sacred-Secular Binary through Gospel-Pop Performance" Religions 14, no. 9: 1178. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14091178
• Review: ‘The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality. By Nina Sun Eidsheim’. In Popular Music, Cambridge University Press 40(3-4): 538-540. (2022).
• Public facing - Stormzy: This Is What I Mean – spirituality takes centre stage on the artist’s new album, The Conversation (2022). https://theconversation.com/stormzy-this-is-what-i-mean-spirituality-takes-centre-stage-on-the-artists-new-album-196251

Conference Papers 

• Detroit’s Amen Corner: The Crossing of ‘Sacred and Secular’ Boundaries, Society for American Music, Detroit (March 2024)
• YorkTalk – ‘Above Us Only Sky: Spirituality in Popular Music Challenges Predictions that We are Trapped in an Age of Disenchantment’ (Jan 2024)
• NCEM Pre-Concert Lecture on the Spirituals, Reginald Mobley and Baptiste Trotignon (June 2023) 
• Music and Ideas of the Popular, Online Symposium hosted by NABMSA (August 2023)
• ‘Toward a Semiotic Theory for Gospel Music’ ICTM World Conference, University of Ghana, (July 2023)
• ‘Andraé Crouch and the “Gospel Sound”: Gospel Codes in Pop Music’ Pruit Memorial Symposium, Baylor University, Texas (15 – 17 March 2023)
• Amazing Grace - Legacies at 250 Conference (July 2022) Hosted by the Open University at the Cowper and Newton Museum, Olney. Co-organized with Martin Clarke, Nancy Cho and Gareth Atkins
• ‘Stormzy and the Evocation of the Spiritual’ Spirituality and Genre Study Day (May 2022) Middlesex University, London
• ‘Stormzy and the Re-enchantment of our Secular Age’ North American British Music Studies Association Conference (July 2022) Illinois State University, USA
• ‘Secularisation and Gospel Codes’ CCMC: Local and Global Perspectives Conference (2021) Ripon College, University of Oxford, UK
• ‘Sonic Resistance and the Sound of Black British Gospel’ (2020) CBT, Queen’s Foundation, Birmingham, UK

Teaching

Undergraduate

• BA Critical Thinking and Listening
• Music’s Meanings - Semiotics
• History of African American Music
• African Diasporic Music Studies

Postgraduate

• MA Music
• PhD student Supervision – ongoing