About

This site gathers information about various projects undertaken by Dr Gillian Dooley about Jane Austen and music, both as a researcher and performer.

Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Associate Professor in English literature at Flinders University, South Australia, and has held Visiting Fellowships at Edinburgh University, Chichester University, Southampton University, and Trinity College Dublin. She has published widely on various literary and historical topics. She was co-convenor of the ‘Immortal Austen’ conference in Adelaide, July 2017.

Her research on Jane Austen often focuses on music in her novels and her world. As a singer she has been curating and presenting programs of music from Austen’s personal collection in Australia and overseas since 2007, and also often incorporates performance into her presentations. 

In October 2020 her talk titled 'Juvenile Songs and Lessons:  Music Culture in Jane Austen’s Teenage Years' was featured as a special event at the Jane Austen Society of North America Annual meeting. The following week she presented a long-postponed concert titled Jane Austen: the French Connection at Adelaide University. Since that time she has presented dozens of Austen music concerts in Australia, the UK, and the USA.

One of her long-term projects was creating a detailed index of each of the hundreds of items in the Austen family music collections for the Southampton University Library catalogue (completed mid-2021). Her book She Played and Sang: Jane Austen and Music was published by Manchester University Press in 2024, and she is now working with colleagues on more Austen-related music projects.

For further details see research web page at Flinders University.