PhD, MPhil, LGSM (mt)

Professor of Music Therapy


Room: Hel 073

Email: amelia.oldfield@anglia.ac.uk

Telephone: 0845 196 2979
International: +44 1223 363271 ext 2979


Professor Amelia Oldfield's research activity

Amelia Oldfield has worked as a clinical music therapist in Cambridge for the past 32 years. For the first seven years she worked full-time with children and adults with a wide range of learning disabilities. She then moved on to working part-time (three days a week) with children with developmental problems and in child and family psychiatry.

In 1994, Amelia Oldfield co-initiated the two-year MA Music Therapy course at Anglia Ruskin University and has taught on it two days a week ever since. She gives weekly music therapy lectures and workshops on her special areas of clinical expertise which include autism, developmental difficulties, child psychiatry, working with families and diagnostic assessments. She also teaches single line clinical improvisation and is particularly interested in encouraging students to use orchestral instruments in their music therapy work. On the days when she is not working at the University she has music therapy students on placement observing her clinical work at the Croft Unit for Child and Family Psychiatry, in Cambridge. She supervises five music therapy PhD students and provides consultancy for several on-going music therapy research investigations.

Amelia Oldfield has completed four music therapy research investigations. The first investigated the effectiveness of music therapy with groups of adults with profound learning disabilities and led to an MPhil, awarded by City University in 1986. The second was a two year project looking at music therapy with various groups of mothers and pre-school children, and was completed in 2000. The third and fourth projects investigated aspects of music therapy with children with autism and led to a PhD awarded by Anglia Ruskin University in 2004. The first of these projects analysed music therapy treatment with pre-school children with autism and their parents. The second looked at how music therapy could be used to assist diagnosis in children with borderline autism. In May 2011, she received the CIMTR Canadian International Music Therapy Research Centre Award for Outstanding International Music Therapy Research from the Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario Canada.

She has published numerous articles and six books, two of which focus on her specialised music therapy approach with children and their families which she developed through clinical practice and research. As co-editor of two recent books, she has encouraged and supported other music therapists to write about clinical approaches with families and working in schools. Two of her books have been translated into other languages including Russian, Greek, Japanese and French. Amelia Oldfield is regularly asked to present her work both in the UK and abroad and has been invited to give 13 keynote speeches at music therapy conferences. She is a visiting professor for music therapy training courses at the Université de Montpellier and at the Fachhochschule in Würzburg where she teaches students in French and German. In December 2012 she organised a successful, large two-day conference at Anglia Ruskin University, during which 50 speakers from across the world presented papers and workshops. She has produced six music therapy training DVDs, two of which have won awards from the Royal Television Society, East Anglia.

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