Academic biography

Dr Barbara Dignam (she/her) is Assistant Professor in Music in the School of Theology, Philosophy, and Music. She holds a PhD in musicology from Maynooth University. Her research explores 20th and 21st century musics that intersect music, language, and digital technologies in her investigation of, among other things, human interactions with cultural output and the relationships and processes underpinning them. Her engagement with new music and its practitioners facilitates the capture of contemporary experiences of new concepts, approaches and technologies in use.

She was a contributor to The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (UCD Press, 2013) and extracts from her PhD thesis on the electroacoustic work Babel by contemporary Irish composer Roger Doyle featured in Irish Musical Studies 11: Irish Musical Analysis edited by Gareth Cox and Julian Horton (Four Court Press, 2014). More recently, Barbara's research on Babel was the subject of the Contemporary Music Centre of Ireland's Amplify Podcast Series (2021-22). She contributed an article exploring current trends in electroacoustic composition in Ireland to the Association of Irish Composers’ AIC New Music Journal (2016) and was subsequently invited to submit an extended study on the topic, Chasing Sonic Threads, to TEMPO: A Quarterly Review of New Music (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her research on women and electroacoustic music in Ireland will appear in the forthcoming volume Irish Musical Studies 13: Women and Music in Ireland in 2022 (Boydell & Brewer, eds. Jennifer O’Connor-Madsen, Ita Beausang, Laura Watson).

Following chairing the Brian Boydell Centenary Conference and Celebration in 2017,