Dr Erin Johnson-Williams

Erin Johnson-Williams is a Lecturer in Music Education and Social Justice. Her research focuses on decolonisation, the imperial legacies of music education, trauma studies, gender and maternity, hymns and race, and soundscapes of colonial violence. She has published widely on the history of music education in Britain and the British empire, and has particular interests in decolonising music education in the UK, trauma, and colonial experiences of concentration, incarceration and enclosure through music and sound.

Erin received her PhD from Yale University, which examined the role of empire and authority in constructions of musical education in late nineteenth-century Britain. Prior to working at Southampton, Erin worked at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and Durham University. She is co-editor of Intersectional Encounters in the Nineteenth-Century Archive: New Essays on Power and Discourse (Bloomsbury Academic: 2022), Hymns and Constructions of Race: Mobility, Agency, De/Coloniality (Routledge, 2024), and the Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism (under contract: OUP, 2024). She has also co-edited special issues of the journals Women and Music, Postcolonial Studies and the Yale Journal of Music and Religion.

She is Director of the Centre for Music Education and Social Justice at Southampton, which launched in 2023, and invites PhD students working on topics related to music education, de/colonisation, trauma and social justice. As of August 2024, Erin is Project Lead for the AHRC Hub for Public Engagement with Music Research.