Hester Bell Jordan Awarded 2023 Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship
Congratulations to Hester Bell Jordan, current PhD Candidate in Musicology, named as a recipient of the American Musicological Society (AMS) Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship. Awarded solely on the basis of academic merit, the Fellowship is a twelve-month stipend set at $24,000 for a current Doctoral Candidate pursuing a dissertation at a North American university.
Hester is the first-ever AMS fellow from McGill University and only the third student from a Canadian university to receive the prestigious award. Her proposed dissertation thesis is “Notorious Ladies and Charming Daughters: Women-Led Music Businesses in Early Nineteenth-Century Europe.” Hester presently studies musicology with a concentration in gender and women’s studies at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. She received her master’s in musicology (2015) and bachelor’s in violin performance (2013) from the New Zealand School of Music. Hester’s research centres on issues of music and gender in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European music culture. Supervised at Schulich by professors Lisa Barg and Tom Beghin, her doctoral thesis explores how members of two women-led music businesses—the piano making company Nannette Streicher née Stein and the music publishing company Mlles Erard—negotiated gender, identity, work, and family during this period. Hester is also interested in the intersections of music and settler-colonialism in the twentieth century. She is the recipient of the 2020-2021 International Grant Competition in the Doctoral Music Research category, as well as a finalist in the Schulich School of Music 2019 Research Alive Student Prize.
The 2023 AMS Fellows were announced on April 26, 2022. Each year, the AMS awards fellowships as part of the following programs: the Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship; The Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship; and the William F. Holmes / Frank D'Accone Dissertation Fellowship in Opera Studies. These fellowships support dissertation and pre-dissertation research in musicology and related fields, and are a fundamental part in how the AMS helps to support the future of music research and innovation.
