Leah Broad is an award-winning music writer specializing in twentieth-century music, and is currently a junior research fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford. Her first book, Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World was published in 2023. She has writing published and forthcoming in journals including Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music & Letters, and Music and the Moving Image, and in edited volumes for a variety of university presses. She was a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2016 and won the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism in 2015.

Anja Bunzel is a musicologist and holds a research position at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. She gained her BA and MA from Freie Universität Berlin, and her PhD from Maynooth University. Her research interests include music and gender, cultural transfer through private music-making in Central Europe during the nineteenth century, and nineteenth-century song. She is sole author of The Songs of Johanna Kinkel: Genesis, Reception, Context (2020) and co-editor of Musical Salon Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century (with Natasha Loges, 2020) and Women in Nineteenth-Century Czech Musical Culture (with Christopher Campo-Bowen, 2024).

Rebecca Cypess, musicologist and historical keyboardist, is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Music at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She is the author of Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (2022), Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo’s Italy (2016), and more than forty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. As director of the Raritan Players, she has released three recordings of music exploring women’s performance practices in eighteenth-century Europe.

Joe Davies is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and Maynooth University. His research centres on nineteenth-century music, its interaction with other art forms, and its relationship with notions of authorship, gender, and self-fashioning. These interests come together in his Marie Curie project, which examines the impact of widowhood on women’s musical creativity in the long nineteenth century. His publications on women in music include (as editor and author) Clara Schumann Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and the special issue ‘Clara Schumann: Changing Identities and Legacies’ (2023), guest-edited with Nicole Grimes. He is currently co-editing, with Roe-Min Kok, Clara and Robert Schumann in Context for Cambridge University Press. With Laura Tunbridge and Susan Wollenberg, he organized the bicentenary conference, ‘Clara Schumann (née Wieck) and Her World’, held in Oxford (2019), and with Natasha Loges the international conference ‘Women at the Piano 1848–1970’, held at UCI in 2023. He co-leads with Yvonne Liao the Women in Global Music Research and Industry Network (WIGM).

Margot Fassler is Keough-Hesburgh Professor Emerita of Music History and Liturgy, University of Notre Dame and Robert Tangeman Professor Emerita of Music History, Yale University. Recent books include The Virgin of Chartres (Yale, 2010); Music in the Medieval West and Anthology (New York, 2014); (with Jeffery Hamburger, Eva Schlotheuber, and Susan Marti) Life and Latin Learning at Paradies bei Soest, 1300–1425: Inscription and Illumination in the Choir Books of a North German Dominican Convent, 2 vols. (Munster, 2016), Medieval Cantors and Their Craft (ed. with Katie Bugyis and AB Kraebel) (York, 2017), and Cosmos, Liturgy and the Arts in the Twelfth Century: Hildegard’s Illuminated Scivias (Philadelphia, 2023). A digital model based on the illuminations of Scivias (with C. Jara and B. Wolff) will appear in 2024. Her digital project “Medieval Liturgy: Tutorials for Students, Teachers & Researchers” (with Katie Bugyis and Cara Aspesi) is supported by Notre Dame’s Faculty Research Program and by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Sophie Fuller’s research interests centre around gender, sexuality, and music in Britain in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Author of The Pandora Guide to Women Composers (1994), she has published widely on women’s engagement with music and music-making. She has co-edited two essay collections: Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity (with Lloyd Whitesell, 2002) and The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (with Nicky Losseff, 2004) as well as editing, with Jenny Doctor, Music, Life, and Changing Times: Selected Correspondence between British Composers Elizabeth Maconchy and Grace Williams, 1927–77 (2020). She currently works at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance (London) where she is Professor of Gender Studies in Music.

Louise Gray (Louise Marshall) is a writer and lecturer in Sound Arts at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. She has written extensively on post-1945 female composers and their compositional methods: her doctoral work, at Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP), focused on an indicative group of such composers – Ellen Fullman, Joan La Barbara, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, and Éliane Radigue – to consider the methods by which they came to a place of creative work. She writes regularly for The Wire, focusing on experimental musics, and her journalism has also appeared in numerous publications, including The Times and the Guardian. Her writing includes a chapter on John Cage, ‘Sound Streams’, in The Wire Primers (2009), an essay on Annea Lockwood’s River Archive for Other Editions (2022), and ‘Beyond the Audible: Éliane Radigue’s OCCAM Works an Inter/Listening’, which addresses space, time, and sound in the composer’s acoustic work, in Contemporary Music Review (forthcoming). Other research interests centre upon acousmatic writing and the intersections between sound and psychoanalytic theories.

Matthew Head is Professor of Music at King’s College London. He researches the cultural history of eighteenth-century music. His books include Orientalism, Masquerade, and Mozart’s Turkish Music (2000); Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany (2013), and Harriet Stewart (née Wainewright): English Music between the Highlands and Bengal (in preparation). He is a contributor to several other Cambridge University Press titles, including the Cambridge Companion to Haydn (2005), The Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia (2019), the journal Eighteenth-Century Music, Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1680–1880 (2020), and the Cambridge Companion to The Magic Flute (2023).

Paula higgins has published and lectured widely on women in music from the Middle Ages to the present, including the first studies of early music from a feminist critical perspective. Her most cited article, ‘Women in Music, Feminist Criticism, and Guerrilla Musicology’ (1993), figures on syllabuses internationally. She has held professorships at four universities wherein she also created the first courses on women and gender in music: Duke University; University of Notre Dame; Nottingham University; and the University of Vienna, the last as Käthe-Leichter Visiting Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research has been facilitated by visiting fellowships at Harvard University, Wolfson College, Oxford, the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY), and Royal Holloway, University of London, in addition to awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation, the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, and the American Musicological Society (AMS) (Alfred Einstein Award, 1987; Publication Subvention, 1999). Under her editorship of Journal of the American Musicological Society (1996–8), the journal garnered five prizes for outstanding articles. Among other AMS roles, she served as a member of the Program Committee for the 1988 AMS Baltimore meeting, the first to feature feminist musicology, and as founder of the Donna Cardamone Jackson Publication Fund for gender and early music.

Nicola Lefanu has composed around 100 works for a variety of mediums. Her music is published by Edition Peters and Novello and is widely played, broadcast, and recorded. She has composed eight operas, which have been staged in the UK, Ireland, and the USA. In April 2017 she celebrated her seventieth birthday and was BBC Radio 3 ‘Composer of the Week’. The same year also saw premieres of five new works, including ‘The Crimson Bird’, with text by John Fuller, a dramatic scena commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS) for the BBC Symphony Orchestra (BBCSO). In 2020, a CD with four of her major orchestral pieces was released by NMC Recordings. It features the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and the BBCSO. Premieres since 2021 include a string quintet, ‘Triptych’, for baritone and chamber orchestra, music for saxophone orchestra, and solo works for horn, clavichord, and piano. She was born in England in 1947 to Irish parents; her mother was the composer Elizabeth Maconchy. LeFanu studied at University of Oxford, the Royal College of Music, and Harvard University. She is active in many aspects of the musical profession and was Professor of Music at the University of York, 1994–2008. http://nicolalefanu.com

Gascia Ouzounian is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, where she leads the European Research Council-funded project Sonorous Cities: Toward a Sonic Urbanism (SONCITIES). Her work as a musicologist and sonic theorist explores sound in relation to space, urbanism, and violence. She is the author of Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts (2021), and has contributed articles to leading journals of music, visual art, and architecture, including Computer Music Journal, Organised Sound, Leonardo Music Journal, Journal of Visual Culture, Journal of Architecture & Culture, and Journal of the Society for American Music. She serves on the editorial board for the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and for Elements in Music and the City (Cambridge University Press). In 2013 Ouzounian co-founded the research group Recomposing the City, which brings together sound artists, architects, and urban designers in developing interdisciplinary approaches to urban sound studies and urban sonic practices. Recent projects include Scoring the City (2019–), which explores experimental notations for urban design; and Acoustic Cities: London & Beirut (2019), for which ten artists created works responding to the sonic, social, and spatial conditions of London and Beirut.

Roxanna Panufnik (FRAM, GRSM (Hons), LRAM, b. 1968) is one of the most versatile and cherished British composers working today. She studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music, and her works for opera, ballet, choirs, and orchestras and chamber music and music for film and television are performed worldwide. Thanks to her hybrid heritage, she has a great love of music from a variety of cultures and different faiths. Her mission to build musical bridges between the three Abrahamic faiths has resulted in commissions from the World Orchestra for Peace in Jerusalem, and from the BBC for the Last Night of the Proms in 2018. The year 2023 saw the premiere of the reworking of her father Andrzej Panufnik’s Five Polish Folk Songs with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and her debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus at the Ravinia Festival. She composed a piece for King Charles III’s Coronation (commissioned by His Majesty) and a song cycle Gallery of Memories co-commissioned by Oxford Lieder and Presteigne Festivals (and was appointed composer-in-residence at the latter, which took place in August 2023). She is Associate Composer with the London Mozart Players and composer-in-residence with VOCES8. Her works are published by Peters Edition and recorded on many labels, including Signum, Warner Classics, Chandos, and EMI Classics. www.roxannapanufnik.com

Stephen Rodgers is Edmund A. Cykler Chair in Music and Professor of Music Theory and Musicianship at the University of Oregon. His research focuses on the relationship between music and poetry in art songs from the nineteenth century to the present day. He has published widely on this topic. He edited the collection of essays The Songs of Fanny Hensel (2021). His book The Songs of Clara Schumann was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press. He hosts a podcast about poetry and song under the title ‘Resounding Verse’ and runs a website devoted to songs by underrepresented composers under the title ‘Art Song Augmented’.

Alexander Stefaniak is an associate professor of Musicology at Washington University in Saint Louis. His research focuses on nineteenth-century performer–composers, piano music and performance, and Romantic aesthetics. He is the author of two monographs: Becoming Clara Schumann: Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of Musical Canon (2021), and Schumann’s Virtuosity: Criticism, Composition, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century Germany (2016). Stefaniak has also published articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music & Letters, the Journal of Musicology, and the essay collection Clara Schumann Studies, edited by Joe Davies (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Laurie Stras is Professor Emerita of Music at the University of Southampton, and director and researcher of the early music ensemble, Musica Secreta. She has published many articles and chapters on women musicians in the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, and has made six critically acclaimed albums with Musica Secreta. Her scholarship has been recognized by a number of awards: her 2007 article, ‘White Face, Black Voice: Race, Gender, and Region in the Music of the Boswell Sisters’ (in the Journal of the Society for American Music), received an American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) Deems-Taylor Award; her co-edited book (with Bonnie Blackburn) Eroticism in Early Modern Music was awarded Best Collaborative Project by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women in 2015; in 2016, she received the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society for her work with Musica Secreta; and in 2019, her monograph Woman and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara (Cambridge University Press, 2018) received the Otto Kinkeldey Award, also from the American Musicological Society. She was elected a Corresponding Member of the American Musicological Society in 2020.

Shirley J. Thompson OBE, PhD, DPhil, DMus, DLitt, MusD, DArts, award-winning composer, visionary artist, and cultural activist, has attracted new audiences worldwide with her groundbreaking works, transforming contemporary classical music. She is highly versatile, producing many works for orchestra, the operatic stage, the instrumental/vocal/dance/multimedia Shirley Thompson Ensemble, TV, film, theatre, choir, and the solo voice. Her music has been described as ‘superbe’ (Le Figaro), and ‘powerful and striking’ (BBC Radio 3). She is thought to be the first woman in Europe within the last forty years to compose and conduct a symphony. The work, New Nation Rising: A 21st Century London Symphony, an epic musical story, celebrates London’s thousand-year history; the recording, by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, features two choirs, solo singers, a rapper and dhol drummers, altogether almost 200 performers. The concept of this extraordinary work (originally commissioned to celebrate Her Majesty the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002) was assumed as a framework for the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. She co-scored the ballet PUSH which toured to more than forty major opera houses, including the Marinsky Theatre, La Scala Milan, and Sydney Opera House. Her opera series, Heroines of Opera (2006), encapsulating narratives of iconic women in history, especially those of African and Caribbean heritage, has created exciting new roles for extraordinary performers and challenged the traditional portrayal of women in the operatic canon. She has consistently demonstrated in her work a belief in the transformative power of music to effect social, cultural, and political change.

Susan Wollenberg is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Music, and Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. She has published widely on topics including keyboard music, the music of Schubert, the social history of music in Britain, and women composers. Among her recent publications, she contributed chapters to the Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s Winterreise (ed. Lisa Feurzeig and Marjorie Hirsch, 2021) and The Songs of Fanny Hensel (ed. Stephen Rodgers, 2021), as well as to Clara Schumann Studies (Cambridge University Press, ed. Joe Davies, 2021) and the Routledge Handbook of Women in Music (ed. Rhiannon Mathias, 2022). She co-edited, with Mariateresa Storino, Women Composers in New Perspectives, 1800–1950: Genres, Contexts and Repertoire (2023) and, with Robin Darwall-Smith, Music in Twentieth-Century Oxford (2023).