Meet the Team
WIGM was founded in 2020 by Joe Davies and Yvonne Liao. The network has an international team of advisors drawn from a variety of cultural backgrounds, career stages, and professional affiliations. Each advisor will contribute their distinct expertise to WIGM’s activities, outreach, publications, and grant applications.
CATHERINE STRONG
Advisor
Catherine Strong is a Senior Lecturer in the BA (Music Industry) at RMIT University. Her research focuses on gender, collective memory, and heritage in relation to popular music, as well as abuse within the music industries. Recent gender-related publications include the edited collection Towards Gender Equality in the Music Industry (Bloomsbury, 2019) as well as articles in Continuum and Gender, Work and Organisations. She is the co-editor of the journal Popular Music History.
COLLIN JEROME
Advisor
Collin Jerome is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Language and Communication at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. He received his PhD in 2012 from the University of Sussex and has published widely in the following areas: literature and applied language studies, gender and queer studies, human rights and peace education. His recent publications include a research article on ‘Rethinking visions of “unity” and “belonging”: Insights into audience responses towards popular music of Malaysia’s indigenous ethnic communities – A case of Iban popsong’ that has recently been accepted for publication in Kajian Malaysia: Journal of Malaysian Studies.
GAVIN LEE
Advisor
Gavin Lee (PhD Duke) is a scholar of music studies at the intersection of global musical modernisms, popular music, queer and decolonial theory, posthumanism, and East Asia. His work is published by Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Current Musicology, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, and Routledge. An Assistant Professor at Soochow University, China, Lee is the founding co-chair of the American Musicological Society’s Global East Asian Music Research Study Group, and the Society for Music Theory’s Global Interculturalism and Musical Peripheries Group, and serves in the leadership of LGBTQ+ committees across the music societies.
LORRAINE BYRNE BODLEY
Advisor
Lorraine Byrne Bodley is Professor of Musicology at Maynooth University. She holds a double doctorate in Music and in German from University College Dublin (2000). She is the first woman in Ireland to be conferred with a DMUS in Musicology, a higher doctorate on published work (NUI, 2012) and the second woman to receive a DMUS in Ireland: the first was Annie Patterson in 1889. She is the first woman to be elected President of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (2015–2021) and the first female musicologist to be elected Member of The Royal Irish Academy (2015). In 2016 she was granted a personal chair in musicology at Maynooth University. She is General Editor with Harry White of the book series, Irish Musical Studies.
Professor Bodley is known internationally for her work on Schubert, on Goethe and Music, on which she has published prolifically and given over 150 international guest lectures. She has published 15 books and is currently completing a new biography on Schubert which has been commissioned by Yale University Press. She is a Board Member of the Internationale Schubert-Gesellschaft (Tübingen, 2013) and the Kommission für Schubert Forschung at the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaft (2020).
Lorraine is active in the recovery of ‘Women in Weimar’ showing how Goethe used music to transform private and cultural issues for women of the time into public discourses and manipulate public opinion. Her critical edition of Eberwein and Goethe’s melodrama, Proserpina, has been performed by the National Symphony Orchestra (2007), the Thüringer Symphoniker (2010), and the Munich Symphony Orchestra in 2016. She has written on the music of her husband, Seóirse Bodley, and curates his archive.
NICOLE GRIMES
Advisor
Nicole Grimes is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Irvine. She is fascinated by the interdisciplinary relationship between music and literature, and music and philosophy. Her most recent research focuses on Clara Schumann. Grimes’s books include, as author, Brahms’s Elegies: The Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth Century German Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and as co-editor, Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism and Expression (University of Rochester Press, 2013), and Mendelssohn Perspectives (Ashgate, 2012). She has published widely on topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. A key aspect of her teaching is the recovery of the voices of women composers, as for example in her course Women Composers of the 20th and 21st Centuries. This agenda for recovery extends to her research. Together with J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Nicole Grimes is the Series Editor of the New Cambridge Music Handbooks being developed by Cambridge University Press, central to the editorial vision for which is a focus on women composers and Black composers. Her research has been funded by European Commission (Marie Curie Fellowship, 2011–2014), the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (University College Dublin, 2009–2010), and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD, Humboldt University, Berlin, 2007–2008).
SAMANTHA EGE
Advisor
Samantha Ege is the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford. She is the recipient of a Newberry Library Short-Term Residential Fellowship (2019) and the Society for American Music’s Eileen Southern Fellowship (2019) for her work on women’s contributions to concert life in interwar Chicago. Her research addresses Florence Price’s professional network and has been published in American Music, Women and Music, and the Kapralova Society Journal. She released Four Women: Music for Solo Piano by Price, Kaprálová, Bilsland and Bonds with Wave Theory Records in 2018. Her latest album (released on LORELT) is called Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price.
SUSAN WOLLENBERG
Advisor
Susan Wollenberg was until October 2016 Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Music, and Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall (where she is now Emeritus Fellow) as well as Lecturer at Brasenose College. As an undergraduate at Lady Margaret Hall she studied with Egon Wellesz (who became her doctoral supervisor) and Bernard Rose, as well as taking piano lessons with Leonie Gombrich. She has published on a variety of research interests, chiefly analytical studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, Schubert studies, historical keyboard music, local history of music, and women composers. Besides numerous journal articles and contributions to symposia, her book-length publications include Music at Oxford in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Oxford University Press, 2001); Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Ashgate, 2004), co-edited with Simon McVeigh; The Piano in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Ashgate, 2007), co-edited with Therese Ellsworth; Schubert’s Fingerprints: Studies in the Instrumental Works (Ashgate, 2011), and, co-edited with Aisling Kenny, Women and the Nineteenth-Century Lied (Ashgate, 2015). She is currently co-editing with Matthew Head the Cambridge Companion to Women Composers. She has devoted any spare time she could find to playing piano duets and accompanying a community choir, as well as arranging music in connection with those activities, and composing.
VERONICA NEO
Advisor
Veronica Neo spearheads the global business and product strategy of Primephonic, providing a digital future for the classical music genre. She closed the first ever pay-per-second deal in the music streaming industry with the major labels (Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment). Equipped with an MBA from IE Business School and a ABRSM certificate in piano performance, she is an advocate for fair and sustainable payouts towards artists in the music streaming business.
Veronica joined Primephonic at its early founding stages and continues to play a vital role in shaping the tech workplace as Chief Operating Officer. Over a span of 6 years, Primephonic has grown to be a team consisting of over 50 classical music lovers from 26 different countries. She actively promotes a culture that values its female workforce and consistently looks for a space to recognise the work of women in the music tech start-up scene.
As a conference speaker, she is a familiar face at the annual Classical:Next and International Artist Managers' Association (IAMA) conferences. She is also an advisor to Grammy-winning classical label Pentatone and several other start-ups in The Netherlands.
A serial entrepreneur, Veronica began her digital sales career at age 16, where she was commended by The Straits Times (Singapore) in 2003 as one of the youngest entrepreneurs with a commercially-viable online fashion business. Since her first venture, she has gained diverse business experience internationally (Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, France, China, and The Netherlands) helping luxury tech start-ups and premium fashion brands to establish the most appropriate business models in maximizing sales and digital opportunities in various markets. Veronica’s strategic business skills and passion thrive in the intersection of business and arts in the digital sphere.
Accolades:
HANNAH MILLINGTON
Social Media Officer
Hannah Millington is a PhD candidate in Music at Dublin City University. Her thesis addresses the early choral and solo vocal works of Dame Ethel Smyth from a biographical perspective, situating the music within its historical context and considering the religious, political, and social influences behind its creation. Hannah’s broader research interests include women's networks; vocal works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the relationship between music and literature. Hannah is the Student Representative for the Society for Musicology in Ireland (2021–24), and is a founding member of the Dublin Musicology Collective.
JOE DAVIES
Co-founder
Joe Davies is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the University of California, Irvine and Maynooth University. Previously he was Lecturer in Music at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, and an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth.
His research centres on nineteenth-century music, its interaction with other art forms, and its relationship with notions of authorship, gender, and self-fashioning. These interests come together in his Marie Curie project, which examines the impact of widowhood on women’s musical creativity in the long nineteenth century.
His publications include Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert, co-edited with James Sobaskie (Boydell & Brewer, 2019), and Clara Schumann Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He is currently finishing his monograph Schubert and the Gothic (Boydell & Brewer, 2022), co-editing Clara and Robert Schumann in Context with Roe-Min Kok (Cambridge University Press), and co-editing a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review with Nicole Grimes on ‘Clara Schumann’s Legacies’.
Together with Yvonne Liao, he is co-founder of the Women in Global Music (WIGM) research and industry network. In this capacity he seeks to create an open and collaborative forum for engaging with women’s voices across borders.
YVONNE LIAO
Co-founder
With Joe Davies, Yvonne Liao is a co-founder of the Women in Global Music (WIGM) research and industry network. Animating music history in and out of the classroom, and civic advocacy are two of Yvonne’s parallel interests, and she is particularly keen to promote women’s contributions through cross-sectoral collaboration and historically-engaging entrepreneurship. After gaining degrees from the University of Oxford (2002) and SOAS University of London (2003), Yvonne worked as a project and marketing manager at Naxos and Universal Music, and earned a second MA in arts administration from Columbia University, before returning to the higher education sector in 2012. After completing her PhD at King’s College London in 2016 (awarded 1 January 2017), she continued her work at Oxford, first as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2017–20), then as a Research Associate at TORCH, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (2020–21), before spending a rewarding year in Scotland as a Teaching Fellow in Musicology at the University of Edinburgh (2021–22). She moved to her childhood city of Hong Kong in summer 2022, joining The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) as an Assistant Professor in Musicology from August.
A keen advocate of collaborative research and practice, Yvonne is also a co-founder of the interdisciplinary funded network, Colonial Ports and Global History (CPAGH) at TORCH (2018–21), and a founding co-organiser of the American Musicological Society’s Global Music History Study Group.
Yvonne’s current work as a music historian explores, in tandem, questions of coloniality, global historiography, and musical agency, with a particular though not exclusive focus on treaty port lives and coastal port cities in twentieth-century East Asia. Her writings among other publications have appeared in The Musical Quarterly and Cambridge Opera Journal. Yvonne’s projects-in-progress include the monograph, provisionally entitled Imperfect Global: Thinking European Music Cultures in Shanghai and Hong Kong, 1897–1997 (under contract, University of Chicago Press/New Material Histories of Music Series), a special issue in Postcolonial Studies, themed ‘Music, Empire, Colonialism: Sounding the Archives’, an article contribution to The Chopin Review, on treaty port Shanghai’s pianos and place-signification as part of a special issue on Chopin and East Asia, and The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism, which she is co-editing with Erin Johnson-Williams and Roe-Min Kok.