Dr Samuel Wilson is a lecturer and researcher. Coming from a research background in music (PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London, 2013), their work at LCDS focuses on performance within societal and interdisciplinary contexts. In particular, they are interested in understanding performance critically, routinely making use of ideas and frameworks from critical theory, psychoanalytic theory, and materialism – from Marxism to posthumanism.
They have published on topics such as contemporary performance’s – and in particular contemporary music’s – relationships with bodies, technologies, the material conditions of “the contemporary,” and the political economy of neoliberalism (and after).
They are the author of New Music and the Crises of Materiality: Sounding Bodies and Objects in Late Modernity (Routledge, 2021). They edited the collection Music—Psychoanalysis—Musicology (Routledge, 2018) and co-edited a special issue of Contemporary Music Review on ‘Musical Materialisms’ (2020). Their articles have appeared in journals such as the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music and Letters, and Twentieth-Century Music.
Their academic practice is driven by collaboration and formative conversations, and they regularly organise conferences, conference streams, panels, and other events. They are a committee member of the Music and Philosophy Study Group of the Royal Musical Association. As a founding member and Trustee of the charity London Critical, they have, along with others, coordinated the annual transdisciplinary London Conference in Critical Thought since its inaugural event in 2012.
In addition to their role at LCDS, they are a Research Fellow and lecturer at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. They also work as a freelance composer for media.
Currently working on:
I am currently working on two research projects. The first explores resonances and parallels between contemporary dance and music composition, to develop a critical theory of systems and/in the creation of works for performance. Specifically, I am interested in how performance-based engagements with systems (such as GenAI or ecosystemic frameworks) express and enact epistemic notions of the contemporary world – as a set of interlacing systems.
The second project builds critical concepts and an international network of scholarly and theorist-practitioner collaborators, developed in relation to ideas of contemporary musical modernism. This project, co-led with Dr Christine Dysers (Aalborg University, Denmark), reappraises “modernism” as an aesthetic and investigative concept appropriate to today, and explores intersections with interdisciplinary debates encompassing ideas from “metamodernism” to “the contemporary”.
Further details of my current projects and publications can be found on my website.
I welcome PhD proposals and am interested in research collaborations in the following areas:
- Dance-music connections within the contexts of recent practices of production and consumption, neoliberalism, and “the contemporary”
- Performance, critical theory, and psychoanalytic theory
- Performance and contemporary technologies, ecologies, and materialities
Supervised PhD projects:
Cameron Dodds, ‘The Composer as Fiction Maker’, PhD (Guildhall School of Music and Drama)
Examined PhD projects:
Adriana Barrueto, ‘Haptic Listening: Aesthetic Studies of the Operative Traits of Sensation in Rock Recordings,’ (Kingston University London)