Jane Davidson

Biography

Professor Jane W. Davidson is currently Professor of Creative and Performing Arts and Chair of the Creativity and Wellbeing Research Initiative at the University of Melbourne. She has enjoyed a long career in opera and currently coordinates the opera program at the University of Melbourne, working closely with Victorian Opera. She is immediate past President of the Australian Music and Psychology Society, former President of the Musicological Society of Australia and member of the Australian Research Council’s humanities and creative arts panels for Excellence in Research for Australia. University leadership positions include Deputy Director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Associate Dean Engagement and Partnerships, Associate Dean Research, Head of Performing Arts, and most recently, Acting Director of the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne. She was previously Chair of Music at the University of Western Australia and Professor of Music Performance at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Jane’s areas of research include bodily movement, musical expression and performance; understanding musical ability; arts practice and its relationship to wellbeing; and history of emotions. Recent outputs include the two-volume series Opera, Emotion and the Antipodes (with Stephanie Rocke and Michael Halliwell, Routledge, 2020), the six-volume series A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Modern and Post-Modern Age (with Susan Broomhall and Andrew Lynch, Bloomsbury, 2019), Music Nostalgia and Memory, Music and Mourning and My Life as a Playlist (all with Sandra Garrido, Palgrave, 2019, Ashgate, 2016 and UWA Press, 2014), and The Music Practitioner (Routledge, 2017).