Awarded American Society for 18th Century Studies Gale Fellowship

I am delighted to announce that I have been awarded a Gale–American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellowship for my research project, The London Bach: J. C. Bach, Musical Celebrity, and Reputation in Georgian Print Culture.

Offered through a partnership between Gale, part of Cengage Group, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the fellowship supports innovative research into the long eighteenth century using digital humanities methods. Gale’s fellowship programme provides researchers with access to its extensive primary-source archives, the text- and data-mining tools of the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, specialist training, and opportunities to share the resulting research with a wider scholarly community.

My project examines how Johann Christian Bach—once among the most famous and visible musicians in eighteenth-century London—was transformed into the celebrated “London Bach,” and how his reputation subsequently declined. After arriving in London in 1762, Bach became closely connected with the King’s Theatre, Queen Charlotte’s household, and, together with Carl Friedrich Abel, one of the capital’s most important subscription-concert enterprises. The names “Bach and Abel” came to represent not merely two musicians but a recognizable cultural brand. Using newspapers, advertisements, concert notices, libretti, reviews, catalogues, and later historical references, I will trace the ways in which London’s print culture constructed, sustained, and eventually reshaped Bach’s public identity between approximately 1760 and 1820. Digital analysis will be combined with close historical reading to investigate how Bach was represented as a foreign composer, opera professional, royal music master, keyboard virtuoso, concert entrepreneur, collaborator of Abel, and eventually a figure of musical memory.