Joe Davies
Visiting Assistant Professor of Music
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BMus King's College London; MSt University of Oxford; DPhil University of Oxford
Research Areas: Nineteenth-Century Studies; Aesthetics; Gender; Women in Music; Piano Culture; Global Musicology
Joe Davies is Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at New York University Abu Dhabi. He holds a DPhil and MSt in Musicology from the University of Oxford and a BMus from King’s College London. He has taught at the University of Oxford, Maynooth University, Ireland, and the University of California, Irvine.
His research is driven by a fascination with interdisciplinary approaches to music and death, women in music, and global song and piano culture. He is currently writing about the impact of widowhood on women’s creativity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His publications include The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert (Boydell & Brewer, 2024); Clara and Robert Schumann in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2025, co-edited with Roe-Min Kok); Clara Schumann Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2021); and Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert (Boydell & Brewer, 2019, co-edited with James Sobaskie). With Nicole Grimes, he guest-edited the special issue “Clara Schumann: Changing Identities and Legacies” (Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 2024); and with Natasha Loges, he is co-editing Global Perspectives on Women Pianists (Boydell & Brewer) and In a New Key: Studies of Women Pianists (Oxford University Press).
A committed public musicologist, Davies co-founded (with Yvonne Liao) the Women in Global Music Research and Industry Network (WIGM), and has chaired five international conferences, most recently “Women at the Piano 1848–1970”. He has served on the Council of the Society for Musicology in Ireland and in 2024 was elected as Chair of the Schubert Institute United Kingdom. He has received grants from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Irish Research Council, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship from the European Commission (Grant No. 894071).