Women and (Musical) Histories: Early Career Researcher Day

This one-day event aims to support early career researchers exploring the intersections of gender and history across the humanities and creative arts.

This free one-day event is open to early-career researchers currently enrolled in a PhD programme, or within ten years of completing one.

It addresses questions of career development and publication for emerging researchers,  showcases practice-based research, and offers the chance to engage in career networking.

This interactive event is specifically targeted at pathways and platforms available for academic publishing. The event will include talks from Academy researchers, a panel discussion with published early career and established academics, and a presentation from an experienced industry scholarly publisher with a specialist gender studies list. We aim to provide an important opportunity for early career researchers to come together and share their own work, experiences and insights.

Schedule

Morning Sessions

09:30 – 10:00 | Sign-in and Registration
10:00 – 11:30 | Session 1: Women and (Musical) Histories Research Presentations
Exploring scholarly approaches to researching gender and history across the humanities and creative arts.
- Presentation 1: Victoria Hodgkinson (Royal Academy of Music)
  Demystifying the Diva: Mirroring Original Singers in Search of a Feminist Aesthetics
- Presentation 2: Caro Lesemann-Elliott (Royal Holloway / Newcastle University)
  The AHRC project ‘Music, Heritage, Place: Unlocking the Musical Collections of England’s County Record Offices’
- Presentation 3: Emily Kilpatrick (Royal Academy of Music)
- Jane Bathori and the Histories of Song
11:30 – 12:00 | Tea Break

Afternoon Sessions

12:00 – 13:30 | Session 2: Early-Career Researcher Sandbox Session
Preparing for REF, sharing research strategies, challenges, and opportunities.
- Speaker & Mediator: Neil Heyde
13:30 – 14:30 | Lunch Break
14:30 – 16:00 | Session 3: Academic Publishing Panel
An industry academic publisher presentation, followed by a panel discussion on publishing experiences led by established researchers.
- Panel Members: Alyn Shipton, Anna Beer, Briony Cox-Williams, Christina Scharff
16:00 – 16:45 | Session 4: Networking & Drinks Reception
16:45 – 17:00 | End of Event

Please note that availability for this event is limited.

We will close sign-up once we have reached capacity for our event, which is approximately 50 attendees.

Speakers and Panel Members

Session One

Speaker 1: Victoria Hodgkinson

Victoria is a vocalist and will be graduating from the PhD programme at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) this July. Interested in Baroque and new music, she has performed chamber music at venues and festivals such as the Wigmore Hall, The London Song Festival with Celebrating Australian Music, and The London Handel Festival. Victoria’s research examines embodied feminist aesthetics in operatic practice today. She has presented two public research events at RAM, given papers at five international conferences, and has published in a special edition of the PlaySpace journal on an artistic collaboration with composer Geoff King. As an assistant to Dr. Cox-Williams at RAM, she has developed and taught classes on diversity, concert programming and musical aesthetics.

Speaker 2: Caro Lesemann-Elliott

Caro Lesemann-Elliott is a post-doctoral research assistant for the 'Music, Heritage, Place' project, an AHRC collaboration between Royal Holloway University of London and Newcastle University. Based in Oxford, they achieved their PhD from Royal Holloway in July 2023, with a dissertation titled 'Music, Power, and Place at Exiled English Convents in France and the Low Countries, 1660-1740'. Their research interests include book history, material history, gender, sexuality, space, and other social constructions. They also direct a project-based early music ensemble, The Basilinda Consort. In their spare time, they volunteer as an embroiderer for their local cathedral, wander around museums, and run Dungeons and Dragons campaigns.

Speaker 3: Emily Kilpatrick

Professor Emily Kilpatrick teaches across the academic programmes at the Royal Academy of Music. Co-editor of the first complete critical edition of the songs and vocalises of Gabriel Fauré (Peters), she has published widely on the music and culture of the Belle Époque. Kilpatrick’s monograph French Art Song: History of a New Music (2022) was followed in 2025 by Maurice Ravel (Reaktion). Described in CD Choice as ‘one of the most valuable and insightful books on Ravel ever written’, it received a five-star review from BBC Music Magazine, and was named as one of the FT’s ‘Best Books of 2025’.

Session Two

Speaker: Neil Heyde (introducing and facilitating a discussion on REF)

How do you go about setting priorities for your research and what place could/should the REF have in this? (There’s no doubt it’s critical institutionally.) Drawing on my experience of the REF on both ‘sides’ this session aims to stimulate dialogue to explore both strategic and creative ways of engaging with external frameworks.

Neil Heyde is Head of Postgraduate Programmes at the Royal Academy of Music and Professor of Music of the University of London. He has been cellist of the Kreutzer Quartet since the mid 1990s and has performed extensively as a soloist in continental Europe and the UK. His discography extends to more than 50 commercial recordings of music ranging from the 17th to the 21st centuries. He was a member of the REF 2014 Panel, and has published work on composer-performer collaboration, instrumental choreography, the nature and roles of the musical instrument, dialogues with recordings, and ‘play’ in performance.

Session Three

Speaker and Panel Member: Alyn Shipton (presenting the Industry Academic Publisher Presentation)

Alyn will address the various routes towards publication for Early Career Researchers, including articles in academic journals, contributions to edited collections, and the production of full-length monographs. The presentation will also address questions of Open Access relative to REF requirements, together with issues of copyright and intellectual property on both sides of the Atlantic.

Alyn has been involved in academic publishing since the 1970s, having run the music and musicology list at Macmillan, and, later, various book series for Blackwell Publishers in Oxford. He is currently the music editor for Equinox Publishing in Sheffield, and is their series editor (or co-editor) for Popular Music History, Popular Music Studies and Women in Music. He has also been on the board of the Jazz Research Journal and the Popular Music History journal. His own work having been published by OUP, CUP, Bloomsbury, Routledge and the University of Illinois Press, he has current first-hand experience of several publishers specialising in academic music books and journals.

Other Panel Members

Christina Scharff

Christina Scharff is Professor Culture & Subjectivity at King’s College London. Christina has done research on young women’s attitudes towards feminism, digital feminism, as well as work and inequalities in the classical music profession. Christina is author of two monographs, co-editor of several edited collections, and numerous journal articles.

Briony Cox-Williams

New Zealand pianist and researcher Briony Cox-Williams is a lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music in London. As a pianist she has given concerts both as a soloist and as a chamber musician, with a particular concentration on neglected repertoires, composers and performers. She has published on composers such as Fanny Hensel and Lili Boulanger, and on nineteenth-century performance practice in song. She is currently working on a book about women of the nineteenth century Royal Academy of Music. Other areas of research and teaching activity include concert programming and the way in which gendered uses of language are coded into music theory and practice.

Anna Beer

Anna Beer, originally a scholar of early-modern literature, is now best-known for her feminist studies of female creatives, written for non-specialists. Her most influential book is Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music (2016) which has led to a range of media engagement and numerous collaborations with performers. Ten years on, Anna is again exploring the position of women in the music industry for a new book (Composer: the changing face of music) but now blending historical analysis with interviews with contemporary practitioners. She is a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford

Travel, Venues and Access

This study day will take place in our Concert Room. There will be step-free access via the main building lift.

Please see Visiting the Academy for information on Access, our location and public transport links.

The Academy is informed by the ‘social model’ in its understanding of disability. If you have any access requirements, please contact Victoria Hodgkinson at WMH1conference@ram.ac.uk to discuss.

Related Events

The Academy will also host a the Women and Musical Histories, 1789–1914 International Conference in September 2026.

Support

This conference is supported by the University of London Convocation Trust.

This one-day event aims to support early career researchers exploring the intersections of gender and history across the humanities and creative arts.