Dr Nicola Spelman
School of Arts, Media and Creative Technologies
Current positions
Senior Lecturer
Biography
Nicola Spelman is a musicologist and Senior Lecturer at the University of Salford where she teaches composition and popular musicology. Her authored book Popular Music and the Myths of Madness (2012) identifies links between anti-psychiatry and representations of madness in popular music of the 1960s and 1970s, analysing the various ways in which ideas critical of institutional psychiatry are embodied both verbally and musically in specific songs. Nicola has co-edited books on noise music and the arena concert, and her more recent critical work explores the performance of memory. She has contributed to the development and leadership of popular music education at Salford for many years, designing and delivering modules in a range of subject areas.
Areas of Research
Popular music and radical psychiatry
Music and memory
Noise music
Audience participation