Sarah Collins

Associate Professor Sarah Collins​

sarah.collins@uwa.edu.au​

Exploring ideas about music in our modern world​

We cannot ignore the massive cultural force of a medium like music--a medium that pervades every aspect of our daily lives, from advertising, TV and films, to elevators and shopping malls, from individualised playlists to huge live performance events. Music is everywhere, shaping our thinking and framing our experience. So researching music offers us a unique window into the structuring forces that shape people's view of themselves and the world around them, both now and in the past.

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Associate Professor Sarah Collins is Associate Professor and Chair of Musicology at the UWA Conservatorium of Music. In her research she seeks to understand how the arts (particularly music, literature and film) shaped ways of thinking about political, ethical and economic concepts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Over the past five years, Associate Professor Collins has held academic and research posts in Durham, Boston, Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and now Perth, with her family coming along for the ride.

Her interest in exploring the aesthetic aspects of politics and the political aspects of aesthetics comes from witnessing large-scale changes in ideas about individualism and liberal democracy in recent years.

Associate Professor Collins is currently working on a range of projects that circulate on ideas about the arts and internationalism, commemoration, cultural memory, ethics and virtue, democracy and the ‘liberal imagination’. This work will help us understand how political ideas and collective identities are shaped, maintained and disrupted by cultural forms.

Qualifications:
PhD, BMus, LLB University of Queensland