
Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation)

Professor Monty Adkins
Pro Vice Chancellor (Research and Innovation)
Monty is a senior academic leader, award-winning composer of electronic music, and a leading academic voice in research, innovation, and the arts. He joined the University of Huddersfield in 1998 as a Senior Lecturer. He was appointed Associate Dean for Research, Innovation and Knowledge Exchange for arts and humanities in 2016, Dean of the Graduate School in 2020, and in 2025, became Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation.
Contact
E-mail: m.adkins@hud.ac.uk
Born in Leamington, UK, Monty was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge followed my postgraduate studies at the University of Birmingham, completing his PhD at the University of East Anglia in 1997. As a composer and performer of electronic music he has created installations, concert and audio-visual works, and a number of collaborations with contemporary performers, video artists and photographers. He has released over 20 critically acclaimed albums and completed over 100 works commissioned by institutions such as Ina-GRM, IRCAM, BBC Radio 3, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, SpACE-Net, ZKM (Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe) and Sonic Arts Network, among others. For his oeuvre he has been awarded over 15 international prizes including the Stockholm Electronic Arts Award (Sweden), Grand Prize at Musica Nova (Prague, Czech Republic), and five prizes at the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition (France).
As an academic, he has received substantial research grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Leverhulme Foundation, and British Academy. He has also successfully mentored EU Marie Curie post-doctoral fellowships. His research awards have focused on the history and aesthetics of electronic music, and collaborative practice. He has co-written books with the artist Pip Dickens (University of Lancaster), Sam Gillies (Monash University) and Ian Helliwell; co-edited four collections on the music of Roberto Gerhard, including a recent OUP volume of essays with Rachel Mann (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley). His work on the aesthetics of digital music have resulted over 30 articles and a Routledge Handbook on ‘Rethinking the History of Technology-Based Music’ co-edited with Jøran Rudi. He has also contributed journal articles to Organised Sound (CUP) and the Journal of Music Technology and Education, book chapters on music education, mixed music and the electronic music of Ernest Berk.
He has been a reviewer for the Leverhulme Foundation, Arts and Humanities Research Council, National Science Center, Poland (Culture and Cultural Production) as well as an External Remote Expert for evaluation of the quality of research and impact for the Institute of Musicology in the Assessment of Research Institutes of the Slovak Academy of Sciences for the period 2016–2021. Monty has successfully supervised over 35 postgraduate students as main supervisor including 22 doctoral researchers.
He is currently PI for the AHRC-funded 'Ernest Berk: An Expressionist Outsider' (see Ernest Berk: Diversed Tapes – NMC Recordings).