Prof Emma Sutton

Prof Emma Sutton

Professor

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2676
Email
ess2@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
Room 005
Location
Kennedy Hall

 

Biography

Emma Sutton studied English at the Universities of Exeter and Leeds before taking her PhD, funded by the British Academy, on late nineteenth-century literature, visual art and opera at the University of Cambridge. After several years teaching at Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities she joined St Andrews in 2003. She is Professor of English and an Associate of the UK’s only Centre for Pacific Studies.

Research areas

My principal research interest is musical-literary relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the ways in which music informed writers’ formal experimentation and their politics. This work has three main strands.

The first is music and Decadence, particularly the work of the British artist and writer Aubrey Beardsley and the reception of Richard Wagner’s operas and prose among Decadent writers and visual artists in the fin de siècle. Publications on this subject include Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford University Press, 2002). This research informed events for public audiences: BBC Proms broadcasts (including, with Simon Russell Beale, for the bicentennial performance of Wagner’s Ring cycle conducted by Daniel Barenboim); lectures in 2014 at the Moscow Conservatoire and the Pushkin Museum (broadcast Moscow 24 TV); and the catalogue essay on music for the 2020 Aubrey Beardsley exhibition at Tate Britain / the Musée d'Orsay.

A second interest is in music and modernist writing, particularly the work of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. I have been a board member of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf since its inception in 2006 and am editing The Voyage Out for that scholarly edition. In 2013 I published Virginia Woolf and Classical Music (Edinburgh University Press) and, in 2014, Anglo-American pianist Lana Bode and I established the AHRC-funded Virginia Woolf and Music project. I edited, with Michael Downes, the FMLS Special Issue Opera and the Novel (2012) and, with Tsung-Han Tsai, the first book-length study (2020) of Forster's novel Maurice. 

More recently, my research focuses on music’s role in the colonial history of Oceania. In 2018, colleagues at National University of Samoa and I established an ongoing collaboration on customary Sāmoan music (SFC-GCRF funded); this project is led by Susau Solomona, producing educational resources and new creative works for public audiences from primary school to HE level. In tandem with this work, I am writing a study of the networks of Hawai‘ian, Sāmoan and i-Kiribati musicians with whom Scottish writer and amateur composer Robert Louis Stevenson made music in the 1880s and 1890s.

I have supervised more than twenty-five doctoral students (funded by SGSAH, the AHRC, ESSE and the Carnegie Trust), and would be pleased to consider research applications in the areas described above.

PhD supervision

  • Ellie Mitchell
  • Mara Curechian
  • Valery Goutorova
  • Rachael Stark
  • Nat Bartels

Selected publications and performances

  • How Virginia Woolf’s work was shaped by music

     Sutton, E. S., 26 Mar 2021

    Research output: Non-textual form › Web publication/site

  • Whitman and Stevenson: singing the nation from Scotland to Samoa via Ohio and Hawai'i

     Sutton, E. S., 20 May 2021, Song beyond the nation : translation, transnationalism and performance. Bullock, P. R. & Tunbridge, L. (eds.). Oxford: The British Academy, p. 254-268 12 p. (Proceedings of the British Academy; vol. 236).

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

  • Open access

    'Restless mystical ardours': decadence and music

     Sutton, E., Oct 2020, Decadence: A literary history. Murray, A. (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 218-233

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

  • Beardsley’s Musical Work

     Sutton, E., Feb 2020, Aubrey Beardsley exhibition book. Calloway, S. & Corbeau-Parsons, C. (eds.). Tate Publishing, p. 32-37

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

  • Clarion: by Eve De Castro Robinson

     Williams, B., Bates, C. R. (Other) & Sutton, E. S. (Other), 19 Feb 2020

    Research output: Non-textual form › Performance

  • Gender wars in music, or Bloomsbury and French composers: Woolf, Tailleferre, Boulanger

     Sutton, E. S., 1 Jun 2020, Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace: Transnational Circulations . Mildenberg, A. & Novillo-Corvalán, P. (eds.). Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, Vol. 1. p. 33-48 16 p. (Virginia Woolf selected papers).

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

  • Music in Woolf’s Short Fiction

     Sutton, E. S., 1 Jul 2020, The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music. da Sousa Correa, D. (ed.). Edinburgh University Press, p. 544-551 8 p.

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

  • Twenty-first-century Readings of E. M. Forster's 'Maurice'

     Sutton, E. S. (Editor) & Tsai, T.-H. (Editor), 31 Mar 2020, Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press. 296 p. (Liverpool English Texts and Studies)

    Research output: Book/Report › Book

  • Open access

    Decadence and music

     Sutton, E. S., 1 Aug 2019, Decadence and Literature. Desmarais, J. & Weir, D. (eds.). Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, Vol. 1. p. 152-168 (Cambridge Critical Concepts).

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

  • The Voyage Out: The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf

     Sutton, E. S., 1 Dec 2019, (In preparation) Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf)

    Research output: Book/Report › Book

 

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