Dr Jacob Olley

Dr Jacob Olley

College Research Associate
Research interestsDr Jacob Olley is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Music. His current research project, ‘Debating Music in the Ottoman Press, 1876–1928’, focuses on discussions of music in Turkish-language periodicals during the final decades of the Ottoman Empire. The project seeks to understand how debates about music became a site for historical and social critique amongst Muslim intellectuals, and how they relate to broader global entanglements between Europe and Asia during the long 19th century. Before joining Cambridge, he was a research associate (2015–2020) on the digital publication project Corpus Musicae Ottomanicae: Critical Editions of Near Eastern Music Manuscripts, based at the University of Muenster in Germany. His PhD thesis (King’s College London, 2017) is a cultural history of notation systems in Ottoman music, focusing on the invention of modern Armenian (‘Hampartsum’) notation in the early 19th century. Before this, he did a BA and Masters in Ethnomusicology at SOAS. He has taught at King’s College London and the University of Kassel, as well as giving lectures and invited talks at various institutions. He has also spent extended periods in Istanbul, where he studied the Turkish language and the ney (reed flute).