Adelaide University invites applications for musicologists for the Elizabeth Wood Research Fellowship, whose work embodies this spirit of critical and disciplinary transformation. Two full-year fellowships are available.

At Adelaide University, we create the opportunities you need to achieve your ambitions – because when you thrive, we thrive.  

We are transforming education for contemporary learners and global citizens. Building on a proud legacy and shaped by bold ambition, it’s a place of excellence and equity, where our vibrant community of staff are united by our purpose to inspire Australia’s future change-makers and create a better tomorrow.  

Work that matters

The Elder Conservatorium of Music and School of Performing Arts unite rich tradition and innovative performance; we empower creative thinkers in music and the performing arts to transform their passion into professional success. Learn alongside celebrated artists, collaborate within a vibrant community, and access career pathways across music, acting, dance, stage management, production, and arts leadership. Your journey starts here. 

About the Fellowship

Adelaide University invites applications for the Elizabeth Wood Research Fellowship in Musicology. The Fellowship, generously funded by Professor Sally Macarthur, is named in honour of the world-renowned, Australian-born musicologist Dr Elizabeth Wood. Dr Wood's pioneering work began at Adelaide University, where she wrote the first history of Australian opera. Following her move to the United States in 1977, she undertook groundbreaking research in feminist, and gay and lesbian musicology, and produced a series of highly original critical studies of the English composer Ethel Smyth. Her landmark essay "Sapphonics" and her co-edited volume Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (1994) helped establish an entirely new field of scholarship. Dr Wood profoundly changed how we understand music as a cultural phenomenon, revealing how music, as a dynamic, ever-changing art form, is inseparably bound up with questions of gender, sexuality and identity, and transforming how generations of scholars have thought about music ever since. The Fellowship aims to build on the spirit of Wood’s trailblazing legacy.

For the purposes of the Fellowship, musicology is defined as the academic and scholarly study of music, encompassing music’s history, theory, aesthetics, cultural contexts, and social meanings.  Unlike research driven from the practice of music itself—such as performance or composition—musicology generates knowledge through methods drawn not only from music practice but also from the humanities, creative arts, social sciences, and, increasingly, the sciences. It is an interdisciplinary inquiry into music as a site where sound, body, technology, power, identity, and affect intersect and, more recently, where agency is understood as distributed across human and non -human phenomena. It draws on close analysis of sonic and notational texts, pays ethnographic attention to musical communities, undertakes archival and historiographical work, and utilises theoretical frameworks from critical theory and philosophy—including non-representational paradigms such as new materialism and agential realism—as well as disability studies, postcolonial thought, and media studies.

The field has moved decisively away from positivist or formalist orientations towards an understanding of music not as a self-contained aesthetic object but as a relational practice, always embedded in bodies, technologies, institutions, and histories of inequality. Through recent developments it has moved beyond simply describing music's structures or charting its histories to interrogating the very conditions under which musical knowledge is produced, drawing richly from the most destabilising currents in contemporary thought.

With this orientation as its foundation—and springing from the pioneering work of Elizabeth Wood, who invented highly imaginative methods, developing her own conceptual tools drawn from other disciplines—Adelaide University seeks to attract musicologists for this Fellowship whose work embodies this spirit of critical and disciplinary transformation. Applicants should identify, first and foremost, as musicologists or ethnomusicologists, and their work should demonstrate familiarity with the disciplinary transformations outlined above, while showing clearly how their proposed project will advance the field through innovative, interdisciplinary methods.

Experience  

1. There shall be two full-year fellowships awarded by Adelaide University (the University) to be known as “as “Elizabeth Wood Research Fellowship in Musicology” donated by Professor Sally Macarthur.
2. The Fellowships have a fixed-term annual stipend and can be held for up to one year. The annual value of each stipend is $40,000 plus $10,000 top-up for travel expenses.
3. The Elizabeth Wood Research Fellowship in Musicology shall be open to:
   1. university graduates with a doctorate; or
   2.  university graduates in the final year of their doctorate (who provide evidence of intended submission date within that year)
4. Preference will be given to proposals that clearly articulate an alignment with current trends in musicology as outlined above
5. The Elizabeth Wood Research Fellowship in Musicology is for the conduct of research in musicology and/or ethnomusicology
6. The Fellowship cannot be held concurrently with a comparable fellowship.
7. The number of Fellowships awarded in any given year will be subject to the discretion of the Selection Panel and according to available funding.

Our commitment to inclusion and diversity  

We are committed to fostering a culture of inclusion where diversity is celebrated and everyone feels respected and valued. Adelaide University is an equal opportunity employer, committed to creating a safe, inclusive, and equitable workplace where everyone can thrive. We strongly encourage applications from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, people with disability, and people of all ages, genders, cultural backgrounds, sexual orientations, and gender identities. We are committed to supporting flexible working arrangements and providing reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process.  

Launch your future with Adelaide University now  

 Applicants should identify, first and foremost, as musicologists or ethnomusicologists, and their work should demonstrate familiarity with the disciplinary transformations outlined above while showing clearly how their proposed project will advance the field through innovative, interdisciplinary methods.

Simply click on the Apply Now button and upload your CV and as part of your application (2000 words), submit the following:

• Title, Aims and background for the proposed research (1000 words)
• Research track record of applicant (500 words)
• The significance of the proposed research (200 words)
• Projected outputs (200 words)
• Proposed start and end time of the fellowship, including submission of the final report (100 words).

Submit your application by 11:30pm Monday 19 October 2026

For further information about this opportunity, please contact Stephen Whittington (quoting reference number 493516):  

Stephen Whittington
Director – Musicology Hub
+61 (08) 8313 3689 | stephen.whittington@adelaide.edu.au