Dr Emily MacGregor

Writer, Music Historian, and Broadcaster

About

Dr Emily MacGregor is a writer, music historian, and broadcaster based at King’s College London. She appears regularly as a music expert on BBC Radio. After a childhood spent moving between various rural locations (Scotland, the North East, and the South West of England), she completed a doctorate in music at Oxford University, partly because of the excitingly cosmopolitan travel opportunities she’d been promised it would include. She duly then went further afield, with positions in Berlin, and at Harvard, before finding her way to London, where she initially taught at Royal Holloway. In a past life she played classical and jazz trombone.

Emily has written for the Guardian, Big Issue, and Gramophone, and her latest book, While the Music Lasts: A Memoir of Music, Grief, and Joy untangles the relationship between music and loss. Her writing is represented by Ben Dunn of DunnFogg.

Her first academic book, Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination: Politics, Identity, and the Sound of 1933, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023; more recently, she co-edited Sonic Circulations: Music, Modernism, and the Politics of Knowledge with Emily I. Dolan and Arman Schwartz (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025). She has written numerous research articles, for one of which she won the 2019 Jerome Roche Prize of the Royal Musical Association for an outstanding article by an early career scholar.

Communicating to wide audiences about music and culture is at the heart of her work. Alongside contributing to popular non-fiction, and writing programme notes for major venues, she regularly gives invited talks in her field, speaks at international conferences, and gives public talks for leading London orchestras. Alongside her writing and broadcasting work, she is Editor-at-Large, Classical Music, at Faber & Faber.

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