Kathy Fry is Knowledge Exchange and Research Coordinator, and a historian of 19th and early 20th century music and musical culture
Kathy joined the Royal Academy of Music in 2025 as Knowledge Exchange and Research Coordinator from an adjacent background as a researcher and lecturer in musicology.
Her areas of academic expertise include Wagnerism, opera, music and gender, and London’s musical and sonic history. She has taught and supervised undergraduate and postgraduate students as a lecturer and module convenor at King’s College London, the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford Brookes University. From 2021 to 2024 she was the recipient of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Individual Fellowship (awarded by the European Commission) for a project focused on women composers, poets and collectors of song in transnational Britain during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Prior to this, she was a lecturer and postdoctoral research fellow on the European Research Council funded interdisciplinary project ‘Music in London, 1800-1851’ at KCL. She has presented numerous papers at conferences in the UK, Europe and North America, and given public engagement talks on opera and women in music at venues including London’s Southbank Centre and Conway Hall. She has published her research in academic journals and edited collections and is completing a monograph entitled Wagner and Victorian Modernity (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press, Sound in History series). She holds a PhD from KCL and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Fry, Katherine. “Black Heritage and English Song: Amanda Ira Aldridge, ‘Domestic’ Music and Transatlantic Networks in Imperial London.” Music & Letters (forthcoming).
Fry, Katherine. “Concert Hall Music Drama: From London to Bayreuth and Back Again.” Cambridge Opera Journal 36, no. 1 (2024): 69-92.
Fry, Katherine. “Mary Somerville’s Sound Accomplishments,” in Sound and Sense in British Romanticism, edited by James Grande and Carmel Raz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Fry, Katherine. “Music and Character in the London Reception of Wagner: Conducting the Philharmonic, ca. 1855,” in Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject, edited by Sarah Collins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.