Rachel Beckles Willson
Professor by special appointment Intercultural Performing Arts
- Name
- Prof.dr. R. Beckles Willson
- Telephone
- +31 71 527 1480
- r.beckles.willson@hum.leidenuniv.nl
- ORCID iD
- 0000-0003-1421-8767
Rachel Beckles Willson is Professor of Intercultural Performing Arts at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA). This chair was established by Codarts. Her current artistic research interests lie in cross-cultural and interdisciplinary collaboration, relationships with the other-than-human, and circularity in design processes.
More information about Rachel Beckles Willson
PhD candidates
See also
Fields of interest
Prof. dr. Rachel Beckles Willson has a hybrid professional arts practice, active as multi-instrumentalist, composer and scholar. Current artistic research projects are focused on cross-cultural and interdisciplinary collaboration, relationships with the other-than-human, and circularity in design processes. Alongside her Professorship at Leiden University, she works as 'lector' (Research Professor) at Codarts and Willem de Kooning Academie, Rotterdam.
Research
Beckles Willson's earlier research focused on ways that musical creation is entangled with state politics (particularly in the former Eastern Bloc) and questions of decoloniality; and the implications of activist work with people on the move. She has also worked extensively with object biographies, and striven to decolonise knowledge, such as through her multi-authored, open-access webresource Oudmigrations. Her numerous monographs inclue Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold War (2007)), Orientalism and Musical Mission: Palestine and the West (2013) and The Oud: An Illustrated History (2023).
Grants and awards
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Fellowship for Experienced Researchers, 2008-2010
Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Grant 2008-2009
Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, 2015-18
Frances Densmore Prize 2021, American Musical Instrument Society for article ‘Orientation through Instruments : The Oud, the Palestinian Home, and Kamīlyā Jubrān’ in World of Music, 8/1, 2019.
Professor by special appointment Intercultural Performing Arts
- Faculty of Humanities
- Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
- Beckles Willson R. (2024), Be water, be light. CD. London, UK: PIllango. [audio].
- Beckles Willson R. (2024), A thousand and one hopes. CD. London, UK: PIllango. [audio].
- Beckles Willson R. (2023), The Oud: an illustrated history. Northampton, Mass.: Interlink Books.
- Beckles Willson R. (2023), Teatime! : (Did you think I was here to make the tea?). MP3: NMC RECORDINGS. [audio].
- Beckles Willson R. (2021), Migration, music and the mobile phone: a case study in technology and socio-economic justice in Sicily, Ethnomusicology Forum 30(2): 226-245.
- Beckles Willson R. (2020), The individual outside the community: music education in a fraught space. In: Vu K.T. & Quadros A. de (Eds.), My body was left on the street: music education and displacement. Innovations and Controversies: Interrogating Educational Change. Leiden: Brill. 49-61.
- Beckles Willson R. (2019), Orientation through Instruments: the ʿūd, the Palestinian Home, and Kamīlyā Jubrān, The World of Music 8(1): 23-48 (2).
- Beckles Willson R. (2019), Hearing global modernity: the case of the travelling oud, International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 7(1): 458-485.
- Beckles Willson R. (2019), Listening through the warzone of Europe, Ethnomusicology 63(2): 289-295.
- Beckles Willson R. (2018), Analysing sonic authority: sensoriality, affect and the unsettled body. In: Reyland N. & Thumpston R. (Eds.), Music analysis and the body: experiments, explorations and embodiments. Leuven Studies in Musicology no. 6. Leuiven: Peeters. 125-140.