Hi there! My name is Chris, and I'm a PhD Music candidate at the University of Birmingham, researching in the fields of Performance Practice and Ludomusicology. Playing music since I was a child, it was my time during my undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford honing my essay writing that I discovered a deep love for research and writing. Aside from my academic and performance work, I write and comment on topics in the arts, humanities, and technology.

Qualifications

• MA Music (Open pathway with performance) — University of Birmingham
• BA (Oxon.) Music — University of Oxford
• Numerous professional diplomas in music performance (FNCM, FLCM, FVCM, LTCL, DipABRSM)
• Teacher training through the UoB HEFi, with a view to HEA accreditation as Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Software Proficiencies

• Standard office suites (Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Pages, Keynote, Numbers)
• Markdown editors (Ulysses and similar)
• Web development environments (my personal favourite being Webflow, but have worked with Wix, 1&1, and WordPress before)

Experience

• As a member of the university's Academic Writing Advisory Service, I regularly review students' work from across the university's cohorts and provide feedback on structure, research, persuasiveness, and writing technique. These are skills I've translated into copy editing for publishers and journalistic work as a freelancer. I spent a year working for UpWork, where I completed a number of contracts for a wide range of companies, including blog-writing for Blue Box Coffee, content writing for Agean Cymbals, and creating summaries of long-form media for Uptime
• Since starting in higher education, I have worked as a tutor through companies such as MyTutor and The Brilliant Club, working to help educate primary and secondary school pupils in Maths, English, Music, and History — work that became all the more vital during the Covid-19 pandemic. Through TBC, I also researched and constructed an original course titled "Composers Lost to History", which serves as an introduction for KS3-4 pupils to the many ways composers have, until recently, been lost to time; be it through discrimination, the mechanisms of canonisation, or being stuck in the shadow of their peers and predecessors.
• Having started working with Oriel College's newspaper The Poor Print as an undergraduate as a photographer, graphics designer, composer, and sometime poet, I took the role of editor-in-chief in 2017, managing the paper and editing the student submissions. This was my first taste of editorial work and got me passionate about journalism.
• I'm a regular writer for Voice Magazine, where I write on music and videogames (and often both at the same time, in line with my ludomusicology research). You can read my work for Voicemag here.
• I also occasionally post my longer-form musings to my personal Medium blog, which you can read here.

Interested in Working on...

I will happily consider all tasks presented to me to which you think I could present my skills. My experience and background would lend me particularly to work concerning the arts and humanities. In the past, I have conducted projects in:
- Blog/content writing
- Reviews
- Opinion Pieces
- Journalism
- Interviews
- Copy editing
- Original Research/Research Assistant
- Publishing
- Whitepaper design
- Teaching resource design
- Web design

Previous testimonials

"Christopher did a great job designing and preparing a document for us. We had some fairly specific requirements that made things a bit more complicated than usual, but Christopher worked through them diligently and gave us a final product that met all our needs!" — academic whitepaper design
"High-quality work with many critical and meaningful suggestions." — essay proofread and feedback