Emma Sutton

The work of Aubrey Beardsley; musical-literary relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the work of Virginia Woolf. 

Emma is editing The Voyage Out for Cambridge University Press' scholarly edition of Woolf's work, and working on a study of Robert Louis Stevenson and music's role in late nineteenth-century colonial history in the Pacific.

Emma Sutton studied English at the Universities of Exeter and Leeds before taking her PhD, funded by the British Academy, on late nineteenth-century literature, visual art and opera at the University of Cambridge. After several years teaching at Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities she joined St Andrews in 2003. She is Professor of English and an Associate of the UK’s Centre for Pacific Studies. In 2024, she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 2025 gave the Gordon B. Hinckley Lecture in British Studies. Emma was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for the project 'Hearing the Pacific: Robert Louis Stevenson and Musical Cultures in Colonial Oceania' on which she will be working between 2025 and 2027.

My principal research interest is musical-literary relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the ways in which music informed writers’ formal experimentation and their politics. This work has three main strands.

The first is music and Decadence, particularly the work of the British artist and writer Aubrey Beardsley and the reception of Richard Wagner’s operas and prose among Decadent writers and visual artists in the fin de siècle. Publications on this subject include Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford University Press, 2002). This research informed events for public audiences: BBC Proms broadcasts (including, with Simon Russell Beale, for Wagner’s Ring cycle conducted by Daniel Barenboim); lectures in 2014 at the Moscow Conservatoire and the Pushkin Museum (broadcast Moscow 24 TV); and the catalogue essay on music for the 2020 Aubrey Beardsley exhibition at Tate Britain / the Musée d'Orsay.

A second interest is in music and modernist writing, particularly the work of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. I have been a board member of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf since its inception in 2006 and am editing The Voyage Out for that scholarly edition. In 2013 I published Virginia Woolf and Classical Music (Edinburgh University Press) and, in 2014, Anglo-American pianist Lana Bode and I established the AHRC-funded Virginia Woolf and Music project. I edited, with Michael Downes, the FMLS Special Issue Opera and the Novel (2012) and, with Tsung-Han Tsai, the first book-length study (2020) of Forster's novel Maurice. 

More recently, my research focuses on music’s role in the colonial history of Oceania. In 2018, colleagues at National University of Samoa and I established an ongoing collaboration on customary Sāmoan music (SFC-GCRF funded); this project is led by Susau Solomona, producing educational resources and new creative works for public audiences from primary school to HE level. In tandem with this work, I am writing a study of the networks of Hawai‘ian, Sāmoan and i-Kiribati musicians with whom Scottish writer and amateur composer Robert Louis Stevenson made music in the 1880s and 1890s.

I have supervised more than twenty-five doctoral students (funded by SGSAH, the AHRC, ESSE and the Carnegie Trust), and would be pleased to consider research applications in the areas described above.