Dr Rowan Bayliss Hawitt

Lecturer

  • Reid School of Music
  • Edinburgh College of Art

Contact details

Address

Street

Alison House
12 Nicolson Square

City
Edinburgh
Post code
EH8 9BH

Biography

Background

Rowan Bayliss Hawitt is a saxophonist, cellist, and academic who specialises in music and the environment. She studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (BA Music) and Trinity College, Cambridge (MPhil Music), where she was awarded the Dunlevie King's Hall Studentship and the William Barclay Squire Essay Prize. Her PhD (University of Edinburgh, 2024) drew on ethnography with environmentally-motivated folk musicians in Scotland and England to explore how their practices refract changing understandings of time occasioned by the climate crisis.

In 2024, Rowan held a six-month Landhaus Fellowship at the at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. From 2024-2026, she was an FWO Postdoctoral Fellow at KU Leuven, Belgium, combining archival and ethnographic approaches to examine how fossil fuels and alternative energies are articulated through Scotland’s musical cultures and soundscapes. During this time, Rowan also held a Heritage Collections Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.

Her published work spans musical ‘ecological thinking’, humanities-based contributions to the scientific field of phenology, ecological grief in popular music, musical incursions into anthropogenic extinctions, sonic petrocultures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scotland, and music festivals as sites for seasonal environmental practices. As a performer, Rowan has toured across Europe, East Asia, North America, and New Zealand, and has a particular love for folk and traditional musics from around the world.

Undergraduate teaching

  • Thinking About Music (BMus Year 1)
  • Music 1A: Psychology of Music (Course Organiser)
  • Music Research Project (BMus Year 4)

Postgraduate teaching

  • Perspectives in Musicology (MMus)
  • MMus Dissertation 

Research summary

  • Music and environments/ecologies
  • Ethnomusicology
  • Environmental humanities
  • Energy humanities
  • Petrocultures
  • Popular music and the climate crisis
  • Scottish cultures
  • Time and temporality
  • Folk and traditional music
  • Environmental and energy justice

  • Rowan Bayliss Hawitt. ‘Peat and Diesel’s “Western Isles”’. In Crude Tunes: The Histories and Cultures of Petroleum in Popular Music, edited by John Miller and Josie Taylor (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.). Forthcoming Winter 2027.
  • Rowan Bayliss Hawitt. ‘Extinctions, ethical time, and contemporary folk music in Scotland and England’. Ethnomusicology 71 (1). Forthcoming March 2027.
  • Rowan Bayliss Hawitt. ‘Hearing musical petrocultures in Scotland’s mining communities’. In Critical Perspectives on Petrosonics, edited by Gavin Williams, Laudan Nooshin, and Annette Davison (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.). Forthcoming early 2027.
  • Rowan Bayliss Hawitt. ‘Festival cycles: Music, food growing, and seasonal-political temporalities in (post)austerity Scotland’. Journal of Festive Studies 8 (1). Forthcoming November 2026.
  • Rowan Bayliss Hawitt, Eszter Erdosi, and Matthew Lear. 2026. Special Issue: ‘Attention and the Environment’. Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 30 (3).
  • Rowan Bayliss Hawitt. 2026. ‘Sound recordings, future hauntings: More-than-human music and species loss’. In Listening to the Swan Song: Towards a Subjectivity of Non-Human Organisms in Music and (Music-Related) Literature of the Past and Present, edited by Joanna Godlewicz-Adamiec and Piotr Kociumbas, 241-265 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlag, Imprint of BRILL Deutschland). DOI: https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737019781.241
  • Michelle Bastian and Rowan Bayliss Hawitt. 2023. ‘Multi-species, ecological and climate change temporalities: Opening a dialogue with phenology’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 6 (2), 1074-1097. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221111784 
  • Rowan Bayliss Hawitt. 2022. ‘Musical ecologies of grief: Breathing and environmental justice in Love Ssega’s “Our World (Fight for Air)”’. IASPM Journal 12 (1), 27-42. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5429/v12%20i1 
  • Rowan Bayliss Hawitt. 2021. ‘“It’s a part of me and I’m a part of it”: Ecological thinking in contemporary Scottish folk music’. Ethnomusicology Forum 29 (3), 333-355. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2021.1897950  
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