Rate My Professor Katharine Ellis

Professor Katharine Ellis holds the 1684 Professorship of Music in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge. A cultural historian of music in France during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she studies repertoire ranging from medieval plainchant to Les Six. Her research explains the cultural significance of musical tastes and practices and examines how participants in music worlds navigated France’s aesthetic, social, and regulatory frameworks. Current projects include the turbulent history of Catholic music across French regimes from the Revolution to the aftermath of the 1905 Separation of Church and State. She welcomes PhD applications from students interested in the cultural history of western music, especially in France and the UK, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Ellis’s career includes lectureships at the Open University and Royal Holloway, University of London, and chairs at the Universities of London and Bristol. In 2006, she became inaugural Director of the Institute of Musical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She held the Stanley Hugh Badock Chair in Music at the University of Bristol from 2013 before her appointment at Cambridge in 2017. Her honours include the 2023 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society for French Musical Life: Local Dynamics in the Century to World War II (Oxford University Press, 2021), the 2010 Ruth Solie Prize, election to the Academia Europaea (2010), Fellowship of the British Academy (2013), membership of the American Philosophical Society (2017), Vice-Presidency of the American Musicological Society (2022-2024), and Honorary Membership of the American Musicological Society. She has received fellowships from the AHRC, British Academy, and Leverhulme Trust, including a Major Research Fellowship from September 2024. Key publications comprise French Musical Life (2021), The Politics of Plainchant in fin-de-siècle France (Ashgate, 2013), Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2005; revised paperback 2008), and Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: ‘La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris’, 1834-1880 (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback 2007). She has edited Words & Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century with Phyllis Weliver (Boydell & Brewer, 2013) and contributed articles to journals including Journal of Music Criticism, Cambridge Opera Journal, and Music & Letters on provincial criticism, opera institutions, and audience behaviours. Her scholarship illuminates regional dynamics in French musical life, influencing studies of canon formation, press reception, and ideological contexts.