Dr Férdia Stone-Davis

Biography

Férdia Stone-Davis received a BA in Theology and Religious Studies, an MPhil in Philosophy of Religion and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. She also has an MMus in Early Music Performance Studies from Trinity College of Music, London (now Trinity Laban).

Férdia is currently senior scientist on a three-year research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (University of Graz, from January 2022): ‘The Epistemic Power of Music: On the Idea and History of Artistic Research through Music’. She is Director of Research at the Margaret Beaufort Institute, Cambridge (currently on research leave), and a postdoctoral bye-fellow of Murray Edwards, Cambridge. She is Director of Studies in Theology, Religion and Philosophy of Religion and the Foundation Year Director of Studies at Murray Edwards College. She is the Chair of the Royal Music Association Music and Philosophy Study Group.

She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Musicology at the University of Göttingen, Germany between 2012 and 2015 and has taught in departments of music, philosophy and theology at the University of Cambridge, Anglia Ruskin University, the University of East Anglia, and King’s College, London.

Research

Theology and the Arts
Theology and Music
Theological language
Philosophical and theological anthropology
Ethics
Epistemology and world-making

Publications

Key publications:

Monograph:

Musical Beauty: Negotiating the Boundary between Subject and Object (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, Wipf and Stock, 2011).

Edited volumes:

Edited volume: ‘Home: Creating and Inhabiting Place through Music Activity’, Contemporary Music Review 34(1) (2015). Taylor and Francis.
Edited volume: Music and Transcendence (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015).
Edited volume (with M.J. Grant): The Soundtrack of Conflict: The Role of Music in Radio Broadcasting in Wartime andin Conflict Situations. Göttingen Studies in Musicology (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2013).

Other publications:

Articles:

‘Worldmaking and Worldbreaking: Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer’, in ‘Home: Creating and Inhabiting Place through Music Activity’, Contemporary Music Review 34(1) (2015), 101–20, ed. F. J. Stone-Davis (Oxford: Taylor and Francis).
‘“Vocalising Home”: An Interview with Trevor Wishart’, in ‘Home: Creating and Inhabiting Place through Music Activity’, Contemporary Music Review 34(1) (2015), 5–21, ed. F. J. Stone-Davis (Oxford: Taylor and Francis).
‘Vivaldi Recomposed: Max Richter in conversation’, in ‘Home: Creating and Inhabiting Place through Music Activity’, Contemporary Music Review 34(1) (2015), 44–53, ed. F. J. Stone-Davis. (Oxford: Taylor and Francis).
‘Making an anthropological case: cognitive dualism and the acousmatic’, Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy 90(352) (2015), 263–76 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Chapters:

‘Revaluing Silence’, in On Commemoration, eds. Catherine Gilbert, Kate McLoughlin & Niall Munroe (Peter Lang, forthcoming, 2020).
‘The Consolation of Philosophy and the ‘Gentle’ Remedy of Music’, in Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, eds. K. Butler & S. Bassler (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018).
‘Entering the Unknown: Music, Self and God’, in The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton, ed. J. Bryson (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 165–76.
‘Music and Liminal Ethics: Facilitating a ‘Soulful Reality’’, in The Resounding Soul: Reflections on the Metaphysics and Vivacity of the Human Person, eds. E.A. Lee and S. Kimbriel (Eugene, OR: Veritas, Wipf and Stock, 2016), 285–304.
‘Musical Meaning and Worldmaking: Haydn’s String Quartet in E flat major (op. 33 no. 2)’, in Music and Transcendence, ed. F. J. Stone-Davis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 125–45.