Kit Thickett

Kit Thickett is a first-year PhD candidate in Music History, whose present research interests centre around efforts to define a national operatic tradition, both aesthetically and infrastructurally, in early twentieth-century Britain, and examine ideas of the amateur voice as it traverses the boundaries of folk and art music, community and stage, nature and culture. Prior to starting at Yale, Kit studied Music at Merton College, University of Oxford (BA, 2023), and Musicology and Ethnomusicology at King’s College London (MMus, 2024). Their Master’s thesis, ‘“Her music never seemed so limitless, so universal”: Ethel Smyth and the Sound of English Suffrage’, won the Hilda Margaret Watts Prize for its analysis of the composer’s suffragette anthem, ‘The March of the Women’ (1911). It explored how the intertextuality of the anthem and the forms of affective and bodily discipline engaged in its performances, implicitly circumscribed its chorus and audience, and thereby the membership of the women’s suffrage movement, along the lines of national identity, social class, and sexuality, as well as gender.
Kit’s interest in the tensions between the materiality of the voice and the discursive categorisations pinned upon it stems from their upbringing in the Anglican choral tradition. They sang at St John the Evangelist, Ranmoor, in Sheffield, where they grew up, before holding choral scholarships at Merton College, Oxford, and All Saints’, Fulham. With these choirs and the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain, they have performed around the UK and internationally, as well as on national radio and television. The affective mediation of time and space in sacred music, particularly in digital formats, is another preoccupation since they became involved in of theirs, and one they hope to explore further over the coming years. Kit is also deeply concerned with the ethics of doing music history, particularly from a feminist and queer standpoint, and enjoys presenting their research in different formats and for audiences beyond the academy. When not researching or singing, Kit can usually be found running, eating, or roaming an art gallery.