Rate My Professor Sarah Collins

Professor Sarah Collins serves as Professor and Chair of Discipline (Musicology) in the Conservatorium of Music at the University of Western Australia, as well as Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research Training) in the Graduate Research School. She earned her PhD in Cultural History and Musicology from the University of Queensland in 2010, a Bachelor of Laws from the same institution in 2011, and a Bachelor of Music (Honours) in Musicology and Performance in 2006. Her research specializations encompass cultural history, modernism, aesthetics, and the relationships between culture, politics, technology, and broader intellectual and political currents, drawing on archival sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Collins explores contemporary issues such as freedom, the environment, artificial intelligence, and automation through lenses including musicology, philosophy, film studies, media studies, and literary studies.

Collins has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, Durham University, and L'École des hautes études en sciences sociales. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, co-editor of Music & Letters published by Oxford University Press, Past-President of the Musicological Society of Australia, and a member of the UWA Press board. Her distinguished awards include the 2024 Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association, the 2019 McCredie Musicological Award from the Australian Academy of the Humanities, election as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2020, and the Conservatorium of Music Mid-Career Research Award in 2023. Key publications feature the monograph Lateness and Modernism: Untimely Ideas about Music, Literature and Politics in Interwar Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2019), The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott (Boydell, 2013), and edited collections Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2020). Forthcoming titles include Operatic Mimesis: Automation, Animacy, and Agency (University of Chicago Press, 2026). As lead chief investigator on an ARC Discovery Project titled A Cultural and Intellectual History of Automated Labour (2021-2024), she has delivered public lectures such as the 2021 Callaway Lecture on cultural economy after Covid-19 and discussions on AI at the WA Museum Boola Bardip. Her scholarship appears in journals including the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Twentieth-Century Music, Music & Letters, and Modern Intellectual History.