Dr Ceri Owen

• BA in Music, University of Oxford
• MPhil in Musicology, University of Cambridge
• DPhil in Music, University of Oxford
• AGSM and MPerf in Song Accompaniment and Chamber Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London

I am a pianist and musicologist, and am Lecturer in Performance and Director of Performance at the University of Birmingham.

As a performer I specialize as a collaborative pianist, and have performed extensively in Britain, Ireland, and further afield, appearing at major concert halls and festivals including the Wigmore Hall, Barbican Hall, Kings Place, and St Martin-in-the-Fields, London; the Holywell Music Room, Oxford; the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham; the Hugo-Wolf-Akademie, Stuttgart; and as part of the Oxford International Song Festival, BBC Proms Festival, and Sonorities Festival. I was awarded the Pianist's Prizes at the Grange Festival International Singing Competition (2017) and the John Kerr English Song Award (2018), and have made live and recorded broadcasts for BBC Radio 3. Regular collaborators include baritone Dominic Sedgwick (a former Young Artist at the Royal Opera House Covent Gardent), and Irish traditional musicians Úna Monaghan and Síle Denvir, with whom I founded Of Aran Trio, uniquely exploring intersections between classical and traditional musics and performance practices. 

A passionate educator, I teach both undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Birmingham, and oversee the tuition and assessment of musical performance in the Department of Music. I was previously Lecturer in Music at the University of Oxford, Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow in Song Accompaniment and Chamber Music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London.

A first-language Welsh speaker, I attended my local comprehensive school in North Wales before studying Music at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, holding an instrumental scholarship. I later returned to the University of Oxford to read for my DPhil (PhD), funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council. I hold an MPhil in Musicology from the University of Cambridge, also funded by the AHRC. I trained as a solo and collaborative pianist at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, supported by numerous scholarships.

I oversee the teaching and assessment of music performance in the Music Department. I convene and teach on all the music performance modules at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, providing performance classes, workshops, lectures, and seminars. I also contribute lectures to LC Music and Ideas, and teach LI/LH Ralph Vaughan Williams and his World.

I am currently supervising three PhD students, one supported by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Midlands4Cities scheme, working in partnership with the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

I welcome applications from research students in the following areas: practice as research; music performance studies; music and musicians in Britain and Ireland during the late nineteenth- and twentieth centuries; intersections between classical and traditional musics and performance practices; music and identity formations; song and song performance; interdisciplinary research; music and gender.

Find out more - our Music postgraduate study  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My research focuses on intersections between music, identity, and performance; practice as research; and music and musicians in Britain and Ireland during the late nineteenth- and twentieth centuries. Blending historical, cultural, and practice-informed approaches, my work so far has investigated how cultural and political ideas about national identity were mediated, performed, and embodied within classical music and performance cultures in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. I have been especially interested in the work of twentieth-century composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Growing out of this research, I am also interested in intersections between classical and traditional musics, musical cultures, and performance practices, and since 2019 I have examined these intersections within Of Aran Trio, a collaboration with leading Irish traditional musicians and academics Úna Monaghan and Síle Denvir, in which we uniquely draw together Irish and Welsh traditional musics, pre-existing Western classical musics, electronics, improvisation, and experimental musical practices.

My work has appeared in international peer-review journals including Twentieth-Century Music, 19th-Century Music, Music & Letters, and Tempo. I am co-editor and contributor to the interdisciplinary volume Vaughan Williams in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and the 19th-Century Music journal special issue Subjectivity in European Song: Time, Place, and Identity (2017). I am currently writing a book about the twentieth-century composer Ralph Vaughan Williams for Reaktion Books.

Public Engagement & Impact. I have long been committed to communicating my research findings to a range of audiences, and together with my work as a professional musician, have contributed to numerous BBC Radio 3 programmes as an academic speaker, most recently acting as a research consultant and contributor to the series Composer of the Week: Vaughan Williams Today. I am invited to give lectures and talks for national and international festivals, and in 2020 was the research consultant and academic speaker for the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society’s project Emerging Voices: Art Song & Social Connection. In 2019 I founded a new festival, the Cambridge Song Festival.