Staff profile

Erin Johnson-Williams is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Music. Her research focuses on decolonisation, the imperial legacies of music education, trauma studies, gender and maternity, hymns and race, and soundscapes of colonial violence. Erin’s current Leverhulme project, entitled 'Audible Incarceration: Singing Communal Religion in Colonial Concentration Camps', examines the role of singing, religious experience and trauma in spaces of colonial incarceration, with particular focus on the concentration camps of the South African War.

Erin received her PhD from Yale University in 2015, which examined the role of empire and authority in constructions of musical education in late nineteenth-century Britain. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the Walter L. Arnstein Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies by the Midwest Victorian Studies Association. Prior to working at Durham, Erin was a lecturer at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London, and was also a Visiting Research Associate to the ERC-funded project ‘Music in London 1800-1851’ at King’s College London. She is co-editor of Intersectional Encounters in the Nineteenth-Century Archive: New Essays on Power and Discourse (Bloomsbury Academic: 2022), Hymns and Constructions of Race: Mobility, Agency, De/Coloniality (under contract: Routledge, 2024), and the Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism (under contract: OUP, 2024). Erin is also preparing a monograph on soundscapes of violence in spaces of colonial incarceration.

At Durham, Erin is a member of the Advisory Board and Head of Postgraduates for the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies. She is actively involved in pursuing initiatives towards Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in and beyond music studies, and in how academics can embed EDI initiatives within their research and teaching. 

Book review

• Johnson-Williams, Erin (2021). Online EDI Resources: Towards a Reflexive Archive. Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle
• Johnson-Williams, Erin (2020). Class, Control, & Classical Music. NABMSA Reviews 7(1): 7-9.
• Johnson-Williams, Erin (2018). Sound Knowledge: Music and Science in London, 1789–1851. Context 43: 81-83.
• Johnson-Williams, Erin (2017). Musics of the Free State: Reflections on a Musical Past, Present, and Future. Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa 14(1-2): 99-102.

Chapter in book

• Johnson-Williams, Erin (2022). Enclosing Archival Sound: Colonial Singing as Discipline and Resistance. In Intersectional Encounters in the Nineteenth-Century Archive: New Essays on Power and Discourse. Bryant Davies, Rachel & Johnson-Williams, Erin London: Bloomsbury Academic. 115-136.
• Bryant Davies, Rachel & Johnson-Williams, Erin (2022). Introduction: Encountering the Intersectional Archive. In Intersectional Encounters in the Nineteenth-Century Archive: New Essays on Power and Discourse. Bryant Davies, Rachel & Johnson-Williams, Erin London: Bloomsbury Academic. 1-30.
• Johnson-Williams, Erin (2019). Music Education: The Case of Annie Curwen. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Scholl, Lesa Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Johnson-Williams, Erin (2019). Musical Discipline and Liberal Reform. In Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject. Collins, Sarah. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 15-36.

Edited book

• Johnson-Williams, Erin, Roe-Min Kok & Yvonne Liao (2024). The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism. under contract, Oxford University Press.
• Johnson-Williams, Erin & Burnett, Philip (2024). Hymns and Constructions of Race: Mobility, Agency, De/coloniality. under contract, Routledge.
• Bryant Davies, Rachel & Erin Johnson-Williams (2022). Intersectional Encounters in the Nineteenth-Century Archive: New Essays on Power and Discourse. Bloomsbury Academic.

Edited Journal

• Johnson-Williams, Erin & Meinhart, Michelle (2022). 'Music, Sound and Maternity': A Special Issue of Women and Music. Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, 26

Journal Article

• Johnson-Williams, Erin (2023). ‘The Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches’ Soundscapes of Suffering in the South African War. Nineteenth-Century Music Review 20(1): 119-151.
• Johnson-Williams, Erin & Meinhart, Michelle (2022). Introduction. Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 26: 68-73.
• Johnson-Williams, Erin (2022). Silencing "Savage" Soundscapes: Hearing C-Section Births in the British Imperial Record. Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 26: 101-124.
• Johnson-Williams, Erin (2020). The Examiner and the Evangelist: Authorities of Music and Empire, c.1894. Journal of the Royal Musical Association 145(2): 317-350.
• Johnson-Hill, Erin (2012). Miscellany and Collegiality in the British Periodical Press: The Harmonicon (1823–1833). Nineteenth-Century Music Review 9(2): 255-293.