Staff profile

Patrick Zuk is a specialist in Russian and Soviet music and European cultural history. His publications include Nikolay Myaskovsky: A Composer and His Times, which won a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award for 2022, and the co-edited collection (with Marina Frolova-Walker) Russian Music Since 1917, which was issued in the Proceedings of the British Academy series published by Oxford University Press. His research has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, and the Wellcome Trust. He is currently writing a monograph exploring the role of traumatic experience in shaping the styles and aesthetic orientations of musical modernism. In Epiphany 2024, he co-lead with Professor Helen Fenwick a major interdisciplinary project 'Understanding Offence: (De)limiting the Unsayable', sponsored by Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study and the British Academy. He has recently been awarded a two-year Leverhulme Research Fellowship to support a research project entitled 'The composer in the European imagination: 1830-1970'. 

In 2024, Professor Zuk was conferred with an honorary doctorate from the National University of Music, Bucharest for his contribution to the discipline of musicology. 

Professor Zuk is Director (Arts and Humanities) of Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study. 

He welcomes enquiries from postgraduate research students working on topics germane to his research interests - music and cultural life in Russia and Central/Eastern Europe; artistic modernism; trauma studies; and censorship. 

Authored book

• Zuk, P. (2021). Nikolay Myaskovsky: A Composer and His Times. Boydell Press
• Zuk, P. (2006). Raymond Deane. Field Day Books

Chapter in book

• Zuk, P. Prokofiev and the Development of Soviet Composition in the 1920s and 1930s. In C. Guillaumier, & R. Langdon (Eds.), Rethinking Prokofiev (19-37). Oxford University Press
• Zuk, P. (2018). Hans Keller: the making of an anti-critic. In J. Dibble, & J. Horton (Eds.), British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850-1950 (328-343). Boydell & Brewer
• Zuk, P. (2018). L'ami inconnu: Nataliya Esposito and Ivan Bunin. In L. Byrne-Bodley (Ed.), Music preferred : essays in musicology, cultural history and analysis in honour of Harry White (371-387). Hollitzer Verlag
• Zuk, P. (2016). Semanitka gorya v finale Shestoy sinfonii Nikolaya Myaskovskogo [The semantics of grief in Nikolay Myaskovsky's Sixth Symphony]. In Y. Vlasova, K. Zenkin, & M. Karachevskaya (Eds.), Dvadtsatïy vek. Muzïka voynï i mira: Materialï mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii [The Twentieth Century. Music of War and Peace (231-238). Progress-Traditsiya
• Zuk, P. (2016). Razmïshleniya o stilistike Myaskovskogo posle 1932 goda. In O. Manulkina, L. Ader, & I. Drozdetskaya (Eds.), Liber amicorum Lyudmile Kovnatskoy (290-299). BiblioRossika
• Zuk, P. (2014). The ‘serial’ works of A.J. Potter. In G. Cox, & J. Horton (Eds.), Irish Musical Analysis (202-222). Four Courts Press
• Zuk, P. (2014). Introduction: An Irish Treatise on the Lisztian Tradition of Pianism. In R. Fleischmann, & J. Buckley (Eds.), Tradition and Craft in Piano-Playing, by Tilly Fleischmann (xvii-xxii). Carysfort Press
• Zuk, P. (2013). Musical modernism in the mirror of the Prokofiev-Myaskovsky correspondence. In C. Flamm, H. Keazor, & R. Marti (Eds.), Russian Emigré Culture: Conservatism or Evolution? (229-244). Cambridge Scholar Press
• Zuk, P. (2013). Romansy N. Myaskovskogo na slova Z. Gippius [Nikolay Myaskovsky's settings of Zinaida Hippius]. In N. Dertyaryova, & N. Braginskaya (Eds.), Sankt-Peterburgskaya konservatoriya v mirovom muzykal'nom prostranstve: kompozitorskiye, ispolnitel'skiye, nauchniye shkoly 1862-2012 (218-223). Izdatel'stvo politekhnicheskogo universiteta (Sankt-Peterburg)

Edited book

• Zuk, P., & Frolova-Walker, M. (Eds.). (2017). Russian Music Since 1917: Reappraisal and Rediscovery. Oxford University Press / British Academy. https://doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197266151.001.0001
• Cox, G. (Ed.). (2010). Seóirse Bodley. Field Day Publications ; Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies
• Dibble, J. (Ed.). (2010). Michele Esposito. Field Day
• de Barra, S. (Ed.). (2006). Aloys Fleischmann. Field Day Publications/Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame

Journal Article

• Zuk, P. (2019). Boris Asaf'yev in 1948. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 144(1), 123-156. https://doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2019.1575591
• Zuk, P. (2018). Music as post-traumatic discourse: Nikolay Myaskovsky’s Sixth Symphony. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 17(1), 104-118. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022216684636
• Zuk, P. (2014). Nikolay Myaskovsky and the ‘regimentation’ of Soviet composition : a reassessment. The Journal of Musicology, 31(3), 354-393. https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2014.31.3.354
• Zuk, P. (2012). Nikolay Myaskovsky and the Events of 1948. Music and Letters, 93(1), 61-85. https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcr144
• Zuk, P. (2010). Translating National Identity into Music: Representations of 'Traditional Ireland' in A. J. Potter's Television Opera Patrick. Etudes irlandaises (Villeneuve-d'Ascq), 35(2), 81-97
• Zuk, P. (2004). Words for Music Perhaps? Irishness, Criticism and the Art Tradition. Irish Studies Review, 12(1), 11-29. https://doi.org/10.1080/0967088042000192086