BA, University of Oxford; MMus and PhD, King's College, University of London; Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education, Oxford Brookes University.
Christina Bashford's main research interests are in performance history and the social and economic history of music. Her focus to date has been on musical culture in 19th- and early 20th-century Britain, particularly London, and this has resulted in a range of work on chamber music, concert institutions, audiences, program notes and listening practices. She 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, and has contributed to several volumes of essays, 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). 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 and has given several talks.
Prior to coming to Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Bashford 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 currently 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 project concerning the digitization and interrogation of archives for performance history, which is part of the UK's Transforming Musicology initiative.