WHO I AM AND WHAT I DO

I am an Irish-born music historian, currently based at Maynooth University, who started out working on the intersections between German poetry and music in the nineteenth century. Over the course of my career my interests have evolved and spread into curiosity about Goethe’s relationship with Music and Forgotten Music of Weimar Classicism into explorations of the Art of Song (Women’s Songs and Voices; Songs of Travel; Love Songs), the study of translation, mythography and life writing and – in recent decades – into a fascination with the already vexed question in biography as to how – or whether – pathways between life and art can be mapped. Throughout I have been intrigued with issues of identity and their fluctuations, and all of my books touch on this in some ways.