Adam Behan

I am a musicologist. I work for the most part on recordings and the performance of western music in the twentieth century. Much of my research to date has explored ways of studying individual performers by merging critical and empirical approaches. I work across several musicological fields (theory/analysis, history, popular music studies, performance studies) and also come into contact with other disciplines such as gender studies, film studies, care ethics and creativity studies.

I hold degrees from Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge, where my graduate studies were funded by a Peterhouse Graduate Studentship. I took up a one-year lecturing post in Maynooth University in 2022 and begin a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship here in October 2023, during which I will be writing a book about the cultural history of Irish popular music in the twentieth century.

My research has won awards including the Karl Geiringer Scholarship from the American Brahms Society and the Westrup Prize from the Music & Letters Trust. I have published articles in Music Analysis, Twentieth-Century Music, Quodlibet and Music & Letters, and I have presented papers at multiple international conferences. My latest article, entitled ‘Joni Mitchell’s Urges for Going, 1965–67: Coffeehouses, Counterculture and Care’, appears in the 2023 spring issue of The Journal of the Society for American Music.

All of my publications are open access and can be downloaded from my Academia page.