Dr Frances Wilkins is Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the Elphinstone Institute. She is also a professional musician, performing Scottish traditional music on English concertina. As a researcher, she specialises in Scottish and Northern Canadian singing and instrumental traditions and has worked on research projects in Scotland, Canada and Germany.

She teaches on the MLitt in Ethnology and Folklore and supervises PhD students in Ethnomusicology and Folklore. She has presented papers at numerous academic conferences, including of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, European Seminar in Ethnomusicology, and the International Council for Traditional Music. She has written articles for journals including Musiké, MUSICultures, Folk Music Journal, and Northern Scotland and her first monograph, Singing the Gospel along Scotland's North-East Coast, 1859-2009 was published by Routledge as part of the SOAS musicology series.

She has been invited to give lectures on her research in Scotland and internationally for the St Andrews Society of Toronto, Waskaganish 350 Year Anniversary Festival (Quebec), Banff Preservation and Heritage Society Annual Founders Lecture, Mayfest, The Universities of Durham, Sheffield and Newcastle, Orkney Folk Festival, North Atlantic Fiddle Convention, Scottish Fisheries Museum and at Aberdeen Saltire Society.

Wilkins has worked as a guest editor for Musiké and MUSICultures academic journals and website reviews editor for The World of Music (new series). She is on the editorial board for Folk Music Journal and convened the British Forum for Ethnomusicology annual conference in Aberdeen in 2019. She has convened conferences for the BFE (2009 and 2019) and the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention (2018). She organised Button Boxes & Moothies: A Free Reed Convention in 2015. In 2018 she was on the judging panel for the BFE Book Prize.

Frances Wilkins gained a first class honours degree in music from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of Aberdeen. She gained her PhD from the University of Aberdeen in 2009 and took up the position of Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the Elphinstone Institute in 2013. She became Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology in 2020.