Biography
Job Title: Academic Manager - School of Popular Music and Voice
Courses Taught: BA (Hons) Music (Popular), BA (Hons) Music (Songwriting)
Jack oversees the design and delivery of the Popular Music programme and delivers many of the key lectures for the Contextual Studies module, covering the subjects of music analysis, critical and cultural theory, and global developments in music.
He is also Senior Lecturer on the MA Music course, overseeing and supervising students as they take their studies to postgraduate level and develop a more acute understanding of their own musical practice.
He started his academic journey with a BA in Popular Music and Recording at the University of Salford and followed this with an MPhil postgraduate research degree. In 2015 he completed his PhD in Music in which he investigated and detailed the continued significance of blackface minstrelsy in the twenty-first century and its changing symbolic role in artistic expression and cultural criticism. Alongside his doctoral research area, Jack has developed a collaborative research project that explores the artistic, technical, and ethical parameters of the use of the works and images of the dead, or what he has termed ‘posthumous practice’. Jack presents his research internationally at conferences including at those for the Art of Record Production, International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and the International Festival for Artistic Innovation and reviews journal articles and books in his areas of expertise.
Jack is also a songwriter, music producer, and performer and led the six piece Manchester ska band Physical Jerks for seven years. During this time they performed across Britain at festivals and venues, producing energetic and politically driven material, and recorded and released their own original music. This project continues as Jack records and produces new material with a new line up of former students and staff from Leeds Conservatoire.
