Professor Jane Davidson 

IAS Fellow at Hatfield College, October - November 2025
IAS Fellow at St Aidan's College, May - June 2026

Contact Details

• Home Institution email: j.davidson@unimelb.edu.au 
• Durham email: TBC
• Durham Tel: TBC

Jane W. Davidson is Deputy Director of the Victorian College of the Arts and Head of Opera Performance at the Melbourne Conservatorium, both schools are within the Faculty of Fine Arts & Music at The University of Melbourne, where she is also Chair of the Creativity and Wellbeing Research Initiative.  She is distinguished for her wide-ranging research and writing on social and cognitive approaches to music, history of emotions, creativity and its wellbeing potential, alongside practice-based work in opera. She is recognised for her collaborative work with both emerging and eminent scholars and practitioners from a range of different disciplines. 

With 16 co-authored and edited books, her outputs have included Music and the Mind (Oxford), The Music Practitioner (Ashgate), Music, Nostalgia and Memory (Palgrave), Music in Our Lives (Oxford), A Cultural History of Emotions in the Modern and Post-Modern Age (Bloomsbury), Opera, Emotions and the Antipodes (Routledge). Across her career, Professor Davidson has been credited for her defining work in the social psychology of musical performance and opening avenues for applied music practice to target community resilience building, including improving mental health. She has led multidisciplinary research into observational, participatory and experimental strategies that enhance physical and mental wellbeing for diverse communities of practice via musical skills and expertise acquisition across all life stages. She has also undertaken pioneering systematic theoretical and experimental investigations into variables that can unlock the psycho-social dynamics and benefits of creative artistic engagements for people from diverse backgrounds, placing them within historical context. 

While an IAS Fellow, Professor Davidson will investigate Arts Engagement and Mental Health at Work, a collaborative interdisciplinary research project seeking to explore the divide between work and non-work domains and generate new knowledge regarding the role that engagement with the arts can have for working adults’ experience of loneliness at work, as a major risk to their mental health. Based on her extensive experience in applied and public-focused research, Professor Davidson will also support the building networks with collaborators from arts and industry in both UK and Australia, supporting Drs Karolina Nieberle (Department of Psychology) and Janey Zheng (Durham University Business School), the Principal Investigators on the project. 

Professor Davidson completed a PhD in Music Psychology and MA in Music Performance both at City University, London; and MA in Contemporary Arts, Dance (Leeds). She was a postdoctoral research fellow (Keele), and held previous academic posts at City University, University of Sheffield, and The University of Western Australia. She has received invitations as Guest Professor or Visiting Fellow by 11 renowned international institutions including Guildhall School of Music & Drama (UK), McGill University (Canada), the Lucerne Konservatorium (Switzerland), and The Hong Kong Institute of Education. She has generated research income of more than $27Mil and produced over 320 research outputs. Her research has been supported by many grants including awards from the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, Wicking Trust, Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council. Industry collaborations have included partnerships with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation including Television and Radio National, West Australian and Victorian state opera companies, Creative Australia, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Musica Viva, and Melbourne Recital Centre.

Events

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