Skip to main content
Overview

Professor Bennett Zon

Professor of Musicology


Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Professor of Musicology in the Department of Music

Biography

Bennett Zon is Professor of Music, founder and Director of the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the international research consortium the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International. He is also a co-founder and Director of the International Network for Music Theology, as well as founder and President of the International Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. He is founder and General Editor of the Cambridge journal Nineteenth-Century Music Review and the Routledge Book series Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain, as well as co-founder and co-owner of Nineteenth-Century JISCmail. He is also an Editor of the Yale Journal of Music and Religion, the Congregational Music Studies book series (Routledge), Nineteenth-Century Contexts and the Hellenic Journal of Music, Education and Culture.


Zon researches the relationship of music, religion and science in the long nineteenth-century. He has published four monographs, including The English Plainchant Revival (Oxford University Press, 1999), Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology (Ashgate, 2000), Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Rochester Press, 2007) and Evolution and Victorian Musical Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His edited books include Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines (edited with Bernard Lightman, Routledge, 2020), Evolution and Victorian Culture (edited with Bernard Lightman, Cambridge University Press, 2014), Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley: Musical Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Ashgate, 2012), Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s–1940s: Portrayal of the East (edited with Martin Clayton Ashgate, 2007) and three volumes of Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies (Ashgate, 2002-2003). He has published in numerous journals, amongst them Logos, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Victorian Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, Musicae Scientiae, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Current Musicology, Music and Liturgy, Early Music, Recusant History and Royal Stuart Papers; and he has contributed many articles to Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The New Dictionary of National Biography, Grolier Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era, Dictionary of 19th Century Journalism and the New Dictionary of Hymnology.

Research interests

  • Anglican and Catholic liturgical music and musical cultures
  • Music theology
  • Post-Reformation chant
  • The relationship of music, religion and science in long nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture

Publications

Authored book

Chapter in book

Edited book

Journal Article

Monograph

Supervision students