Jim Samson

Jim Samson

Professor

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Personal profile

Personal profile

Email Address:thomasjamessamson@gmail.com

Research interests

Jim Samson joined the staff at Royal Holloway in 2002 as Professor of Music, having previously been Professor at the Universities of Exeter and Bristol, and has held Visiting Professorships in Norway, Belgium, Hong Kong and the US. He became Emeritus Professor in 2011, and is currently Editor-in-Chief for Grove Music Online: South East and East Central Europe, and one of four Series Editors of The Complete Chopin: A New Critical Edition (Peters Edition, in progress). He has published widely (including 9 single-authored books, and 13 edited or co-edited books) on the music of Chopin, on analytical and aesthetic topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, and on the social histories of music in east central and southeastern Europe. His publications have been translated into German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Norwegian, Korean, Chinese and Japanese. In 1989 he was awarded the Order of Merit from the Polish Ministry of Culture for his contribution to Chopin scholarship, and in 2000 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He also holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Ionian University. His publications include Music in Transition: A Study in Tonal Expansion and Early Atonality 1900-1920 (London, 1977), The Music of Szymanowski (London, 1980), The Music of Chopin (Oxford, 1985), Chopin: The Four Ballades (Cambridge, 1992), Chopin (Master Musicians) (Oxford, 1996), The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge, 2002), Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt (Cambridge, 2003), which was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Book Prize in 2004, Music in the Balkans (Leuven, 2013) and a co-edited volume, Music in Cyprus (London, 2015) with Nicoletta Demetriou. His most recent monograph is Black Sea Sketches: Music, Place and People (London, 2021). He also edited a textbook with J. P. E. Harper-Scott, An Introduction to Music Studies (Cambridge, 2009). His edition of the Chopin Ballades (Peters Edition) was named '2009 Edition of the Year' in the Rhinegold Publishing International Piano Awards, and in 2018 he was awarded the Irish Research Council Harrison Medal in recognition of outstanding achievements in musicology He has recently completed a novel set during the Greek War of Independence. Between 2019 and 2021 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Arts Faculty of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.