Dr Helen Barlow

Professional biography

Helen is a music historian with a particular interest in interdisciplinary approaches. She was educated at schools in Merthyr Tydfil and Cardiff, and read English and American Literature with Art History at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where she went on to write a PhD thesis in Art History.

She joined The Open University in Wales as a tutor in 1993, teaching art history and interdisciplinary modules. Since 1995, she has worked in academic management at The Open University in Wales, where she is a Staff Tutor. She was appointed Senior Lecturer in 2022. Having worked initially as a Research Assistant in the Music Department, she is now also a Senior Research Fellow in Music. 

She is currently the Postgraduate Student Co-ordinator for Music. If you are interested in studying for a PhD in Music with the OU, you can contact her at FASS-Music-Enquiries@open.ac.uk  

Research interests

Helen researches into the social and cultural history of music in Britain and particularly Wales, mainly in the nineteenth century, and into music iconography. She is most at home with interdisciplinary approaches, and finds that her background in literature and art history offers different perspectives on music history.

Her collaboration with Trevor Herbert on the AHRC-funded project ‘Military sponsorship of music in the nineteenth century and its relationship to the musical mainstream’ resulted in their co-authored book Music and the British Military in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2013). More recently, with Trevor and Martin Clarke she co-edited A History of Welsh Music (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Much of Helen's research is underpinned by her work on the Listening Experience Database (LED) project, of which she was a member from its inception in 2012. The project focused on researching historical accounts of people’s experiences of listening to music, with a particular interest in the listening experiences of 'ordinary people'. Helen’s LED research focused on music and Welsh identity through the accounts left by listeners. It examined the idea of Wales as a uniquely musical nation within the framework of 'invented tradition'. The project received two AHRC grants and involved collaboration between The Open University’s Music and Literature Departments and its Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), the Royal College of Music and the University of Glasgow.

Helen is a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism, the Encyclopedia of Local History and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Brass Instruments.