Dr. Frankie Perry

On the Elgar’s Themes project, Frankie is working with the musicology and OeRC teams on the intellectual content and data modelling of the catalogue, and will be creating the catalogue records. She is also pursuing research into Elgar’s modes of communication, from musical theme to picture postcard.

When not working on Elgar, Frankie is Digital Music Collections Specialist at the British Library, where she has worked in classical music special collections roles (manuscripts and sound) since 2021. She has published collections-based research on women’s musical archives, and has ongoing research projects on the archives of the singers Cullen Maiden and Astra Desmond, and on aspects of born-digital collecting. Frankie previously held a postdoctoral role on the InterMusE digital musicology project at the University of York. She has held college lectureships at St Anne’s and Hertford Colleges, Oxford, and was Associate Lecturer at the University of Surrey 2023-2025. Aside from academic work, she enjoys writing for concerts and CDs, most regularly as a programme note writer for Wigmore Hall. Frankie studied at Oxford before completing a PhD (2021) at Royal Holloway, University of London on recent adaptations and arrangements of 19th-century Lieder, with related publications on reception and adaptation histories of Schubert and Brahms.