Dr Paul Harper-Scott is a Reader in Musicology and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. Dr Harper-Scott has produced five books, three as author and two as editor, and has published widely on Elgar, Wagner, Britten, and symphonic music and opera of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His work has strong intersections with continental philosophy and psychoanalysis (Heidegger, Badiou, Žižek, and Lacan) and has increasingly come to espouse an explicitly Leftist perspective. He is General Editor with Julian Rushton of the Cambridge University Press book series, ‘Music in Context’, a member of the editorial board of the Internation Journal of Badiou Studies, and a member of the Council for the Defence of British Universities.