BA, University of Oxford; MM and PhD, King's College, University of London; Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education, Oxford Brookes University
Christina Bashford is a music historian who works in the sphere of cultural musicology, examining the functions and meanings of music, music-making, and its associated activities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has written about chamber music, concert institutions, listening, audiences, and program notes in Victorian Britain--work that explores a range of themes, including the tensions between the sacralization of music and its commodification, and the intersections between music-making, class, gender, and national identity. Her book, The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London, was published by the Boydell Press in 2007. She also co-edited, with Leanne Langley, Music and British Culture, 1785-1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich (Oxford University Press, 2000) and, more recently, with Roberta Montemorra Marvin, a volume entitled The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930 (Boydell, 2016).
Her current research includes a project on violin culture in Britain and Ireland, 1880-1920, on which she has begun to publish essays and has given several talks, including one on the social and political function of the violin class at the Ballykinlar internment camp during the Anglo-Irish War. She is also working on music in Britain during World War 1 and is co-editing (with Gayle Sherwood Magee and William Brooks) a volume of essays for the University of Illinois Press: Over Here, Over There: Transatlantic Conversations on the Music of World War 1.
Dr. Bashford has published articles and reviews in Music & Letters (winner, Jack Westrup Prize, 1991), the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, the Journal of Victorian Culture, Musical Quarterly, Notes, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and Eighteenth-Century Music. She has also contributed to essay volumes, including The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet (2003), The Musical Voyager: Berlioz in Europe (2007), and Music and Peformance Culture: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley (2012), and has written many articles for music dictionaries, most recently The Cambridge Berlioz Encyclopedia (2017).
Prior to coming to Urbana-Champaign, she was on the faculty of Oxford Brookes University in England; before that she served as the Managing Editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992). She is former President of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association. She is also a member of the North American British Music Studies Association, and hosted the society's fifth biennial conference here in July 2012. In 2014 she became a contributor to In Concert, a collaborative research project concerning the digitization and interrogation of archives for performance history, which is part of the UK's Transforming Musicology initiative. She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield (UK).