James joined the Reid School of Music in 2017, having previously worked at the University of Sheffield, Bangor University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Nottingham, where he completed his doctorate on Fifteenth-Century English Mass Cycles, supervised by Peter Wright and Philip Weller. He also previously held a Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Society for Renaissance Studies. 

James works on early music and is especially interested in music of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. He also works on the representation of history in popular media with a focus on TV, film, and video game.

James has published widely in both of these aspects. His first monograph was published in 2019, titled The Cyclic Mass: Anglo-Continental Exchange in the Fifteenth Century (Routledge). He has co-edited a number of books including Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen (Routledge, 2020); History as Fantasy in Music, Sound, Image, and Media (Routledge, 2024) and Manuscripts, Materiality, and Mobility. Essays on Late Medieval Music in Memory of Peter Wright (LIM, 2024), with a co-edited collection on the Trinity Collegiate Church, Edinburgh forthcoming. His two-volume set of critical editions of Masses between English and Continental Provenance for Early English Church Music is forthcoming in 2024. 

James has led a number of externally funded research projects, including the AHRC-funded Space, Place, Sound, and Memory and its impact follow-on, which has resulted in a permanent VR experience at the Chapel Royal in Linlithgow Palace and a commercial CD with the Binchois consort, and which won the prestigious Tam Dalyell prize. He has also led a project to produce a prosopography of musicians in pre-reformation, funded by the Carnegie Trust. 

Outside of the University, James works with the internationally renowned ensemble The Binchois Consort as Scholar in Residence, is a member of council for the Society for Renaissance Studies, and sits on the British Academy’s Early English Church Music committee, where he is area editor for the Fifteenth Century. He also gives many public talks.

James is currently the Research Director for ECA having previously been the Director of Research Innovation and, in this role, co-writes and presents the ECA’s research podcast ‘Artful Enquiry’.