JOE DAVIES
Co-founder
Joe Davies works at the intersection of musicology, pedagogy, and leadership. He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, a Master of Studies from Oxford, and a BMus from King’s College London. His work has been funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Irish Research Council, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship from the European Commission (Grant Agreement No. 894071).
Davies’s research falls broadly into three areas: women in music; interdisciplinary approaches to music and death from the late eighteenth century to the present day; and global approaches to piano culture. He is author of The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert (2024); editor of Clara Schumann Studies (2021), the first in the Cambridge Composer Studies Series to focus on a woman; co-editor of Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert (2019); and guest-editor of the journal issue 'Clara Schumann: Changing Identities and Legacies' (2023). He is currently finalizing Clara and Robert Schumann in Context with Roe-Min Kok and preparing two edited volumes with Natasha Loges on the global history of women pianists.
Over the last decade, he has co-/chaired five international conferences, all promoting inclusive dialogues across performance, scholarship, and public engagement. These include: Clara Schumann (née Wieck) and her World (2019), in association with The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, TORCH; and Women at the Piano 1848–1970 (2023), a collaboration between the Women in Global Music Network, Illuminations: The Chancellor’s Arts and Culture Initiative and the Humanities Center: Building Intellectual Community at the University of California, Irvine.
He has championed diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as the Undergraduate Admissions Coordinator for the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford (2018–19), as well as through serving on the Athena SWAN Self-Assessment Team at Oxford (2018–20); the Council of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (2019–21); the Schubert Institute United Kingdom (2019–); and the Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Studies Oxford Network (2013–16).
He warmly invites conversations about shared interests and potential collaborations with the Women in Global Music Network.
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.