Nicole Grimes is Associate Professor of Music at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin, where she also serves as the Director of Research for the School of Creative Arts. Her work explores the intersections of music, literature, and philosophy, with particular emphasis on the intellectual and aesthetic traditions that have shaped Western music from the late eighteenth century to the present. She is deeply engaged in recovering and reinterpreting the music of women composers who have been excluded from the historical canon—a commitment that informs both her teaching and her research. Her current multi-year project, “The Expansive Canvas: Large-Scale Form in the Music of Women Composers,” investigates how women engaged with the large-scale forms of the long nineteenth century—symphonies, concertos, chamber and choral works—and seeks to reimagine the narratives of music history through analysis, music-historical interrogation, performance, and education. Extending across the arts, The Expansive Canvas also examines how women’s creative ambitions in music resonate with parallel explorations of scale and form in literature, visual art, and philosophy.
In July 2025, Grimes was the recipient of the Anthony Pople Award of the Society for Music Analysis for groundbreaking research at the intersection between German music criticism, analysis and aesthetics from the late eighteenth century to the present.
Grimes’s books include Rethinking Brahms co-edited with Reuben Phillips (Oxford University Press, 2022), and Brahms’s Elegies: The Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which explores the reciprocal relationship between Brahms’s music—as it relates to loss—and the German intellectual tradition. This book was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2022 Danijela Kulezic-Wilson Book Prize of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, and was one of nine Notable Music Books of 2019 by Alex Ross of the New Yorker. Her other books include Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism and Expression (co-edited with Siobhán Donovan and Wolfgang Marx, 2013), and Mendelssohn Perspectives (co-edited with Angela R. Mace, 2012).
Grimes has published articles and book chapters on Beethoven, Brahms, Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, Schoenberg, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Wolfgang Rihm, Donnacha Dennehy, and on topics in music aesthetics in various peer-review journals and books. She is co-editor, with Joe Davies, of a special issue of Nineteenth Century Music Review called Clara Schumann: Changing Identities and Legacies.
Nicole Grimes is the Series Editor of the New Cambridge Music Handbooks. She served on Board of Directors of the American Brahms Society from 2016–2024. From 2020–2023 she served as a Trustee of the Society for Music Analysis in the UK, and has been a member of the Editorial Board of their journal Music Analysis since 2015. She is a member of the Team of Advisors of the Women in Global Music (WIGM Network), and she serves on the Advisory Board for Irish Musical Studies, and the Institute of Austrian and German Music Research. In 2023, she became a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, and she was elected to the Council of the Society for Musicology in Ireland in 2024. Before taking up her post at Trinity College Dublin on 1 August 2024, she held faculty positions at the University of California—Irvine, Royal Holloway—University of London, Keele University, and University College Dublin.
Grimes studied historical musicology at Trinity College Dublin, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, and Humboldt University, Berlin.