Awardees

GWNZ Fellowship, 2020 - 2021

Hester Bell Jordon

Hester Bell Jordon PhD; McGill; Canada I would like to express my sincere thanks to you and the GWNZ Trust for granting me this Fellowship. Receiving this award means a lot to me, both academically and financially, and will enable me to continue my studies with peace of mind. I look forward to becoming a new member of GWNZ!

Hester’s PhD research at McGill University explores how businesswomen in the European music industry negotiated gender, labour, and musical culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. She combines musicology with feminist history, material culture, and consumption to understand the lives and work of the piano-maker Nannette Streicher Stein (1761-1833) and the sisters Marie-Françoise Bonnemaison (1777-1851) and Catherine-Barbe Delahante (1779-c. 1815) of the Mesdemoiselles Erard music publishing company. By studying both written sources left by these women and the physical objects—pianos and sheet music—that they made and sold to their predominantly women customers, this interdisciplinary project not only recovers stories about important artisans and businesspeople, it also offers new approaches to women’s work in the history of music. Following her doctoral studies, Hester hopes to pursue a career as an academic specializing in the intersections of music and gender.

Read about Hester’s progress