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Meet the Expert: Professor Abigail Gardner
Professor Abigail Gardner
Abigail is internationally renowned as an expert within music and sound, and has published widely on a range of topics.
Abigail is an internationally recognised expert in popular music and ageing, listening and sound studies. She is Professor of Cultural Studies in our School of Arts, Culture and Environment.
The importance of music and sound
Abigail has published widely, leading international and national funded research projects working on music and sound’s importance to daily life. She pioneered, with Professor Ros Jennings, thinking about age and popular music and in 2012, they wrote and edited ‘Rock On: Women, Popular Music and Ageing’, which is still being used by academics today and available to buy.
Research into the sound of nature on care home residents
Professor Gardner is currently working on SAGE: Sound, Environment and Ageing: Bringing the Outside into Care Homes which got £336,578 from UK Research and Innovation and the Medical Research Council, to bring natural sounds in UK care homes. The team have been testing soundscapes made with people living with dementia on care home residents across the UK.
PJ Harvey
Coming from the Dorset/Somerset borders, she grew up a few miles north of PJHarvey and has been a fan of hers since the 1990s. Her PhD was on the musician, and this was published as a book in 2015. She is now contracted to write a short book to be published in 2027 called PJHarvey: Place, Memory and the Magic of Dorset. She is currently editor-in-chief for a popular music journal.
How do we listen to the unheard?
Abigail is most proud of her recent book ‘Listening, Belonging, and Memory’ about the importance of ‘connected listening’, which came out of experience of working with older veterans and migrants.
Life in education
Abigail was the first in her family to go to university, and to get A Levels. She went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge to read Japanese.
She was going to do French and German but after watching David Bowie in the film Merry Xmas Mr Lawrence, changed her mind and managed to convince the admissions tutor at Caius to let her in. She transferred to the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, to continue her studies after 2 years and then worked in political publishing and translating for 5 years before heading off to Japan to live.
She resumed academia in 1996 going to the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies for her Masters and PhD which she wrote up at University of Gloucestershire.
Find out more
To find out more about the research and publications Abigail has produced, check out:
Get in touch
To get in contact with Abigail view her UoG profile.
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