Assoc ProfessorTomás McAuley

I am Associate Professor of Music at University College Dublin. Previously, I held postdoctoral positions at the University of Cambridge (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship) and Indiana University. I completed my PhD at King's College London in 2013.

My first monograph, The Music of Philosophy: German Idealism and Musical Thought, from Kant to Schelling, is in production with Oxford University Press. The book examines the relationship between philosophy and musical thought in the years around 1800, investigating links between changing conceptions of music and changing conceptions of ethics, knowledge, and time.

I’m working now on my second monograph, Hearing the Enlightenment: Music, Philosophy, and the Emergence of Modernity, which is under contract with Yale University Press for inclusion in their Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History. The book challenges the conventional scholarly picture of the Enlightenment as a predominantly ocularcentric phenomenon, offering instead a new understanding of this movement as fundamentally musical.

Together with Nanette Nielsen, Jerrold Levinson, and Ariana Phillips-Hutton (associate editor), I also co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy (OUP, 2021). Other work has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Music, Performance Philosophy, The Opera Quarterly (co-edited special issue), Music Theory Spectrum (extended review), The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (eds. Watt, Collins, and Allis, OUP, 2020), Sound and Affect: Voice, Music, World (eds. Lochhead, Mendieta, and Smith, U Chicago Press, 2021), and the Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism (ed. Taylor, CUP, 2021). I have presented my research at meetings of the American Musicological Society, International Musicological Society, Society for Music Theory, and Royal Musical Association, and given keynote or invited presentations in Italy, Canada, and the UK.

From 2010-18, I served as founding chair of the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group (www.musicandphilosophy.ac.uk). I am currently a member of the editorial board of Music and Science (https://journals.sagepub.com/home/mns).

At UCD, I have served as Head of the School of Music (2023-26) and as Director of Research in the School (2020-23).

I am currently supervising Tomos Watkins' PhD dissertation on race and gender in the operas of Rameau. Previous PhD supervision / postdoctoral mentorship:

• Dr Tegan Sutherland, PhD dissertation on "'Fashionable Ornaments': The Reception of Virtuosity in Eighteenth-Century Anglophone Culture" (completed 2026)
• Dr Francesco Milella, Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship project on "Opera, Enlightenment and empire in the late-colonial Spanish Atlantic, 1770-1820" (co-mentored with Professor Ivar McGrath, History; completed 2025)
• Dr Kyle Kaplan, Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship project on "Intimate Critique: Henze, Adorno, and the Aesthetics of Recommitment" (co-mentored with Professor Brian O'Connor, Philosophy; completed 2023).

I am also a member of the UCD Humanities Institute.