Sarah Collins’ research focuses on the relationship between culture, politics, technology, and broader intellectual and political currents. Her work draws insight from archival sources and contexts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bringing these into contact with contemporary anxieties around freedom, the environment, AI, and automation. It draws from cultural and intellectual history, philosophy, musicology, film studies, media studies, literary studies, and the history of philosophy and political theory.

Current projects include a book on mimetic failure and the operatic condition of bodies and signs (forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press); and a book on ‘artificial life’ (forthcoming with the University of Western Australia Press), co-authored with Oron Catts, Elizabeth Stephens, and Ionat Zurr.

Sarah is also the author of Lateness and Modernism: Untimely Ideas about Music, Literature and Politics in Interwar Britain (Cambridge UP, 2019), and The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott (Boydell, 2013); editor of Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject (Cambridge UP, 2019); and co-editor, with Paul Watt and Michael Allis, of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford UP, 2020). Her research has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Twentieth-Century Music, Music & Letters, Musical Quarterly, Cambridge Opera Journal, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Modern Intellectual History, and elsewhere.

Sarah has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, Durham University, and L'École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and has received competitive research funding from a range of sources including the British Academy, the Australian Research Council, and the European Commission.

In 2024, Sarah became just the second Australian to win the prestigious international prize from the Royal Musical Association (UK), the Dent Medal, which recognises a significant contribution to the global discipline. She was also awarded the McCredie Musicological Award in 2019 from the Australian Academy of the Humanities, which ‘recognises outstanding contribution in musicology by an Australian scholar. It is Australia’s most prestigious award for the study of music’ (AAH website). In 2020, she was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and currently serves on the AAH Council.

Sarah is co-editor of Music & Letters (Oxford UP), and has previously been reviews editor for the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and the RMA Research Chronicle. She is a past-President of the Musicological Society of Australia, and has previously served as the state President of the Victorian and Western Australian chapters of the MSA, and as secretary and treasurer respectively of the Queensland chapter. Sarah is also the inaugural host of the MSA podcast series, "Researching Music".

Sarah welcomes prospective Masters and PhD students interested in researching any aspect of culture, politics, and technology, especially as they relate to forms of expression (film, literature, philosophy, music, theatre, opera, and political discourse).

Current Roles:

Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research Training), UWA Graduate Research School

Chair of Discipline (Musicology), UWA Conservatorium of Music

Co-editor, Music & Letters (Oxford University Press)

Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities

Member of Council, Australian Academy of the Humanities

Board Member, UWA Press

Recent Previous Roles:

Chair, UWA Animal Ethics Committee

Deputy Head (Research), UWA Conservatorium of Music

Acting Head of School, UWA Conservatorium of Music

Associate Chair of the Academic Board, UWA

Diversity Lead, Council of the Australian Academy of Humanities

President, Musicological Society of Australia

Council Member, Royal Musical Association (UK)

Lead CI, 'The Cultural and Intellectual History of Automated Labour', ARC Discovery Project, 2021-2024, with CIs Ionat Zurr (UWA), Oron Catts (UWA), and Elizabeth Stephens (UQ)

Cultural History

Modernism

Aesthetics

MUSC4101 Contemporary Debates in Music

MUSC2431 Music and Practices of Listening

MUSC3341 Music, Society and Ideas

MUSC3336 Music in Film, TV, and Video Games

Public Talks/Panels

• ‘The Rise of AI’, In Conversation, WA Museum Boola Bardip, Aug. 2023
• ‘ChatGPT: Why is everyone talking about generative AI, and what does it mean for us?’, Conversations in the Grove, UWA Law School and UWA Tech & Policy Lab, UWA, Perth, 7 Feb., 2023
• ‘Automation Cultures Digestion Panel: Seedbox Community Garden Event’, 3SDC, PS Gallery, Fremantle, 10 Feb., 2022
• ‘The Future of Artificial Intelligence and Humans’, French Dialogues, City of Perth Library, Perth, 6 Oct. 2022
• Callaway Lecture 2021, ‘The Unproductive Arts?: Cultural Economy After Covid’, University of Western Australia (later broadcast on ABC Radio National ‘Big Ideas’, 2 Dec. 2021)
• BBC Radio 3, ‘Music Matters’, 11 Jan., 2020
• ABC Radio National, ‘The Music Show’, 17 Sept., 2019
• ‘Sounds All Around’, Museum of Sounds series, Perth City Library, 23 May, 2019
• ‘Edmund Gurney and the Power of Sound’, UWA Friends of the Library, 14 May, 2019
• ‘Automating Creativity?: Machine Learning and Imaginative Labour in Historical Perspective’, Institute of Advanced Research’s ‘Intellectual Tapas’, 24 Sept. 2019