Eliana Dunford

Hélène La Rue Scholarship in Music

Joining us from: New Zealand

DPhil in Music (2024)

I arrived at St Cross from New Zealand in 2024, having studied both violin performance and musicology at the University of Auckland and then lectured in the same department for several years.

My interests as a musicologist focus on twentieth-century modernism. In particular, I'm preoccupied with untangling how composers responded stylistically to the conditions of modernity, the way that aspects of musical style flow across national borders, and the development of post-tonal harmonic language. For my DPhil thesis, I am focussing on the mid-century Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz, and the ways that she and her contemporaries responded to the conditions of the Second World War, as well as Poland's Stalinist period. I am also interested in music from outside of Poland and have published work on the English composer Benjamin Britten.

Receiving the Hélène La Rue scholarship, in tandem with a scholarship from the Clarendon Fund, was the sole factor that has made my research possible: as an international student, I would not have been able to get a loan for course fees. The stipend has allowed me to focus on my work, while being in Oxford has provided the opportunity to meet a great many like-minded people and to hear new perspectives.

St Cross is a warm, welcoming college and I have particularly enjoyed the international flavour of the community. The fact that the college is specifically for graduate students is also wonderful, since research students often have quite different needs from those of undergraduates.
Outside of my research, I do a lot of choral singing, in the chapel choir at The Queen's College and in Schola Cantorum of Oxford (the university chamber choir). This year I've also taken up rowing for the first time, and really enjoyed racing with the Wolfson-St Cross boat club in Torpids and Summer Eights.