Music, Mortality, Memory

Douglas J. Davies is Professor in the Study of Religion at Durham University and Director of the Centre for Death and Life Studies. His major monographs include Death, Ritual and Belief (3rd ed., 2017), Mors Britannica (2015), Emotion, Identity and Religion (2011), and Theology of Death (2008). He was Series Editor for the six-volume Cultural History of Death (2024) and is an elected Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences, The Learned Society of Wales, and The British Academy. He has also received a Lifetime Achievement Award (2025) from Association for the Study of Death and Society.Matthew McCullough is a musicologist specialising in British music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular interests in death, trauma, and memory. He is an Associate Fellow of Van Mildert College and sits on the advisory board of the Centre for Death and Life Studies. He completed his PhD in Musicology and Analysis in 2024 with a thesis on British composers’ musical responses to the First World War, and is co-editor of the four-volume series Death, Loss, Memory and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1780–1914 (Routledge, 2025).