Sophie Thiele (UCL) - 2025-26 Students
gabriela.thiele.25@ucl.ac.uk

Classification, representation and marginalisation in “English” folk music and dance

In England, the definitions of folk music and dance mainly stem from the 19th century, when collectors set out to preserve largely rural oral traditions. One of the goals of the preservation of the music and dances was to use them for nation building and to add a musical dimension to Englishness. Even though the field developed over time and the narrow focus of the first collectors somewhat expanded to include, for example, factory workers’ songs, the constructed boundaries of folk music and dance remained exclusionary.

This PhD project is a case study of the specialist library of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, in London. It investigates the extent to which the early definitions and classifications of folk music and dance are still present in the library’s knowledge organisation systems and how this led to the exclusion of marginalised communities. The aims are to identify the underrepresentation of marginalised groups in the library’s knowledge organisation systems and to improve the findability of these documents. This project spans library and archival classification systems, as well as indexes and subject headings.

Primary Supervisor: Dr Deborah Lee

Supervisor at Partner Organisation: Tiffany Hore

Partner Organisation: English Folk Dance and Song Society