Jacob Olley

Dr. Jacob Olley is a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Music working on the UKRI project 'Ottoman Auralities and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789-1922'. His research examines musical exchanges between Ottoman, Armenian, and European traditions through manuscript studies and historical analysis.

Olley's interdisciplinary approach connects musicology with global history, investigating topics from Enlightenment-era treatises to 19th-century satire. His publications reconstruct historical soundscapes while critiquing modernization narratives in post-Ottoman states.

As a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2020-2023), he studied musical debates in Turkish-language periodicals, revealing how Ottoman intellectuals developed alternative visions of musical universality connected to pan-Islamic and pan-Asian ideologies. Olley performs Ottoman repertoire on the ney flute and reconstructs historical performance practices.