Professor David R.M Irving FBA

Summary

David R. M. Irving is an ICREA Research Professor in Musicology at the Institució Milà i Fontanals de Recerca en Humanitats, CSIC, Barcelona. He studied at Griffith University, the University of Queensland, and the University of Cambridge, then held research positions at Christ’s College Cambridge and King’s College London. Prior to his current post he taught at the University of Nottingham, the Australian National University, and the University of Melbourne. A Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and Honorary Professor of Music at the University of Queensland, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2026.

Irving’s research interests span from the role of music in early-modern colonialism and intercultural contact to global histories of music and historical performance practice. He is the author of the monographs Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (Oxford University Press, 2010) and The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2024), as well as many journal articles and book chapters. Recent works include studies on the early-music pioneer Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) and his circle.

Irving co-edited, with Tara Alberts, the volume Intercultural Exchange in Southeast Asia: History and Society in the Early Modern World (I. B. Tauris, 2013), and was co-general editor, with Alexander Rehding, of the six-volume series A Cultural History of Western Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). Since 2019 he has co-edited, with W. Dean Sutcliffe, the journal Eighteenth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press). He also chairs the International Musicological Society’s Study Group ‘Global History of Music’.

Awards include the Jerome Roche Prize (2010) and the Dent Medal (2026) from the Royal Musical Association, and the McCredie Musicological Award (2015) from the Australian Academy of the Humanities.