Professor Daniel M Grimley FBA

Summary

Daniel M. Grimley is the Head of Humanities and Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Fellow at Merton College. He was previously the Deputy Head of Humanities and Associate Head (Research), and Douglas Algar Tutorial Fellow in Music at Merton.

Prior to arriving in Oxford, he taught at the Universities of Surrey and Nottingham, and was the Centenary Research Fellow at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His research concerns music, landscape, and cultural geography, especially in the nordic region (Grieg, Sibelius, Carl Nielsen) and England (Elgar, Delius, and Vaughan Williams), as well as environmental humanities, music analysis, modernism and its reactions.

He has published four monographs, most recently 'Delius and the Sound of Place' (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Sibelius: Life, Music, Silence (Reaktion, 2021), and has edited five further volumes.

In 2011, he was Scholar-in-Residence at the Bard Festival, Sibelius and his World, and he returned in 2023 for Vaughan Williams and his World, for which he co-edited a volume of essays with Byron Adams. He led a Leverhulme International Research Network, ‘Hearing Landscape Critically’, in 2013-6, and more recently has been the academic lead for the Environmental Humanities hub at The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) and is PI on a Leverhulme Research Project, ‘Elgar’s Themes: New Pathways for Analysis, Interpretation and Engagement’.

He has edited newly discovered works by Delius, including for an acclaimed recording of the original version of ‘Late Swallws’ by the Villiers String Quartet, and he is a musical advisor to the Delius Trust.

Dan was educated at a state comprehensive school in East Kent and is committed to access, outreach, and supporting talented students from the broadest community, and to advocating for the importance of the arts and humanities in the higher education sector and beyond.