Chris started his musical career intending to be a professional composer. And thus his undergraduate days studying music at the University of Bristol were largely spent composing and performing music. (He plays the piano well and the double bass acceptably.) That was until his final year, when he realized that he was much happier writing and thinking about music than composing it. After Bristol, he went to Wadham College, Oxford, where he received a master's degree in musicology. After a couple of years working and teaching in Oxford, Chris crossed the pond to obtain an MA and PhD in musicology from Princeton University. He now works as a Lecturer in the writing program at Princeton. 

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Chris's work fits broadly into the sub-discipline of song studies. But while songs, above all early nineteenth-century Lieder, make up the core repertory of his scholarly work, his research is motivated by larger ontological questions that encompass other historical periods and genres: what makes music such a privileged medium in the expression of love and desire? How does song stage the erotic encounter with the other (as Other)? What do songs reveal about the social aesthetics of love? How can we theorize the erotics of music as it intersects with gender, sexuality, politics, emotions, ethics, and phenomenologies of difference? He is currently threatening to write a book-length essay On Love Songs that offers a series of close readings of popular songs to examine how song can reveal and prophesize what philosophers and cultural critics recognize as a modern "crisis of love". 

 

Chris is also working on projects about the self-fashioning of disability in the musical work of Maria Theresia Paradis (1759-1824), and the role of musical copyright in the international proliferation of singing translations in the nineteenth century. 

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