Andrew Hugill: Biography

Andrew Hugill M.A. Ph.D. was born Andrew Hugill Thomson in Chichester, England in 1957. He studied at Stroud School, Romsey, then at Monkton Combe School, Bath, before attending Keele University from 1976-1979, where he read English and Music. He continued at Keele for his Masters, gaining an MA in Composition in 1981, studying under Roger Marsh (composition) and Tim Souster (electronic and computer music).

After university, he moved to London and worked as a freelance artist and music copyist for Novello and Co. In 1983, he founded the ensemble George W. Welch. In 1984, he worked at the Opéra de Lyon and the Opéra de Paris with Gavin Bryars (composer) and Robert Wilson (director) on productions of Medea (Bryars) and Médée (Charpentier). In the same year, he joined the Collège de 'Pataphysique. In 1986, he began lecturing at Leicester Polytechnic on the BA Performing Arts: Music programme, teaching composition, performance and history.

In 1992, Leicester Polytechnic became De Montfort University (DMU), and in 1997 Hugill founded the BA/BSc Music, Technology and Innovation programme following the closure of the Performing Arts: Music degree. By 1999, this included a Research Centre, formed as part of a Centre for Technology and the Arts, for which Hugill won funding from HEFCE. Meanwhile, he had gained his Doctorate and became first a Reader in Musical Composition, then a Professor of Music. During the same period, he also published essays on aspects of literary Modernism and worked as an editor and translator for Atlas Press. In 2006, Hugill was made a National Teacher Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and was Highly Commended at the Times Higher Education Awards for the Most Imaginative Use Of Distance Learning, for his development of a MOO for teaching music.

In 2006, he was part of the team that won £1.3m funding to establish the Institute Of Creative Technologies (IOCT) at DMU, a transdisciplinary research institute that sits at the intersection of science and technology, the arts and the humanities. He immediately became its Director and has since overseen 95 researchers undertaking over 100 collaborative projects worth £7m in external funding. He has personally supervised more than 20 PhD students, and created the MA/MSc in Creative Technologies which is co-delivered across three Faculties. In 2007, he was also part of the team that won £3m funding to establish a Centre of Excellence in Performing Arts at DMU.

He is an Associate Researcher at the Université de la Sorbonne, Paris, and a committee member of the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society. He has continued to work on (mainly French) Modernist literature, leading to a large monograph on 'Pataphysics to be published in 2012 (MIT Press) and several related articles in leading academic journals. His web project with the Philharmonia Orchestra, The Sound Exchange, was nominated for the 2004 BT Digital Music Awards. His book The Digital Musician (Routledge, 2008; 2nd edition 2012) has become a standard text on many Music Technology programmes. He has been a consultant for the Wigmore Hall, London, the BBC 21st Century Classroom project, the National Grid for Learning, and the Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre, Leicester. He has been awarded personal research grants in excess of £3m by EPSRC, AHRC, HEFCE, the DTI, and Arts Council: England.

For a full academic CV, please contact Hugill directly.