Dr Helen Coffey

Professional biography

Helen Coffey joined the Open University as a Research Assistant in 2007 and was appointed Lecturer in January 2012. She studied for a BA in German and Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, subsequently completing her MMus there in Advanced Musical Studies (Historical Musicology) with German. Following this, Helen read for a DPhil in Music at the University of Oxford, supervised by Reinhard Strohm. She spent two separate years in Germany as part of her university education: for her BA degree she studied for a year at the University of Constance, and research for her DPhil was carried out during a year’s residence in the south of the country while affiliated to the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

Research interests

Helen’s research primarily concerns music and musicians of German and Austrian cities and courts from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Recent projects have focused on instrumental sounds in the empire of Maximilian I (1459-1519), the patronage of opera in Germany and Austria c.1700, and the career of George Frideric Handel.

Helen is currently preparing a monograph on instrumental sounds in German cities c. 1500, the research for which was supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship. She has also contributed a number of essays for Musikleben des Spätmittelalters in der Region Österreich, a project based at the University of Vienna. Helen was awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant in 2012 to carry out research in Hanover on musical patronage at the electoral court there. She is co-editor of the six volumes George Frideric Handel: Collected Documents (CUP, 2013-) and of the essay collection Handel in Context ​(CUP, forthcoming). She is a council member of the Handel Institute and co-chair of the OU's Medieval and Early Modern Research Group.