Michelle Assay
Directory
Michelle Assay is the principal investigator of WOMUSIRAN, ‘Women and Western Art Music in Iran’. She is currently a Marie Curie/UKRI Global Fellow at the Universities of Toronto and King's College. Born in Tehran, she received her initial music and piano education during through private lessons with Seda Karapetian, Firouzeh Khasrai, and Lili Sarkissian. She then studied for six years at the Ukraine National Academy of Music, specialising in piano performance and pedagogy, and in music and theatre criticism. She received her PhD in musicology from the Sorbonne and University of Sheffield with a dissertation entitled ‘Hamlet in the Stalin Era: Stage and Score’, which has since been developed into a monograph, contracted for publication by Routledge. She was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Huddersfield from 2019 to 2021, working on Shakespeare and Censorship. She is the author of award-winning articles on Russian and Soviet music and on Shakespeare and music and is the founder of the Shakespeare and Music Study Group (X: @shakesmus). She has held teaching posts at Universities of Manchester, Huddersfield, Sheffield, and Liverpool Hope, as well as Rose Bruford College.
She has been championing works of Polish-born Soviet composer, Mieczysław Weinberg, including a co-authored major life and works volume to be published by Toccata Press in 2025. She continues to appear in concerts as a pianist and curator and is a regular broadcaster for the BBC and contributor to Gramophone, Bachtrack, and Ludwig van Toronto.