Joe Davies works at the intersection of musicology, pedagogy, and leadership. He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford, a Master’s degree from Oxford, and a BMus from King’s College London. His work has been funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Irish Research Council, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship from the European Commission (Grant Agreement No. 894071). He is an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. 

Leadership is central to Davies’s work. He is co-founder (with Yvonne Liao) of the Women in Global Music Research and Industry Network, WIGM; and has co-/chaired five international conferences, most recently Women at the Piano 1848–1970 (2023). He has served on the Council of the Society for Musicology in Ireland (2019–21); the Schubert Institute United Kingdom (2019–); the Athena SWAN Self-Assessment Team at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford (2018–20); and the Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Studies Oxford Network (2013–16).

Davies’s research falls broadly into three areas: interdisciplinary approaches to music from the eighteenth century to the present day; women in music; and global approaches to song and piano culture.

His monograph The Gothic Imagination in the Music of Franz Schubert was published by Boydell & Brewer in 2024. His edited volume Clara Schumann Studies (2021) has been described as a “reading that is as refreshing as it is enlightening”, with the essays “challeng[ing] the many entrenched binaries that have come to dictate our discussions of nineteenth-century music history” (Prince, 2023). Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert (2019), co-edited with James Sobaskie, has similarly been praised for its “tantalizing invitation for further innovation as the Schubertian community accommodates new ideas and approaches with open arms” (Sumner Lott, 2021). His publications also include the journal issue “Clara Schumann: Changing Identities and Legacies”, guest-edited with Nicole Grimes (2023), as well as several contributions to essay collections and reviews of books, CDs, and scores. He is currently finalizing Clara and Robert Schumann in Context with Roe-Min Kok and preparing two edited volumes with Natasha Loges on the global history of women pianists.

Davies has taught as a Lecturer at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford (2018–2021), an external tutor across the Oxford colleges (2013–21), at Maynooth University (2019–24), and the University of California, Irvine (2021–24). He is an active mentor, from undergraduate dissertations to PhD projects, and welcomes enquiries about future collaborations.