Laura Hamer

Senior Lecturer in Music, The Open University
Laura Hamer is a Staff Tutor and Senior Lecturer in Music. She is currently Director of Student Support for the School of Arts and Humanities.

Laura is a Feminist Musicologist specialising in Women in Music. She holds a BA in Music from the University of Oxford and an MA and PhD in Musicology from Cardiff University. She completed a PG Cert in Academic Practice (HE teaching qualification) at Liverpool Hope University in 2013, and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is also a pianist, and holds an LRSM in Advanced Piano Performance.

Laura initially worked for The Open University as an Associate Lecturer between 2010 and 2011. She was also a Lecturer in Music at The Open University in 2011. Between 2012 and 2018 she worked for Liverpool Hope University, including four years as Head of Music. She has also taught Music at Cardiff University, Rose Bruford College, and Royal Birmingham Conservatoire of Music. She served on the Central Committee of the National Association for Music in Higher Education (NAMHE, now MusicHe) between January 2014 and December 2016. She was Lead for the EDIMS (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Music Studies) Network Parents and Carers Working Group between 2020 and 2022.

As a Staff Tutor, Laura oversees tuition and supports students and Associate Lecturers on a range of Music modules throughout the UK (currently A342).

Research interests

Laura’s primary research interests lie in women in music, encompassing both classical and popular traditions. Her monograph Female Composers, Conductors, Performers: Musiciennes of Interwar France, 1919-1939, was published by Routledge in 2018 (paperback edition, 2020). She has also published articles and book chapters on a wide range of women musicians, including composers, songwriters, conductors, and all-woman orchestras, and also on Olivier Messiaen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, reception and criticism studies, and digital musicology. She is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Women in Music since 1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and co-editor, with Helen Julia Minors, of The Routledge Companion to Women and Musical Leadership: The Nineteenth Century and Beyond (forthcoming, Routledge). Please see the Publications tab for a full list of publications.

Laura has organised a number of conferences and events. In 2013 she organised the Eighth Biennial International Conference on Music since 1900. In 2015 she organised the Women in Music since 1913 Symposium, and the same year she co-chaired Hopkins at Hope (a celebration of the time spent in Liverpool by the poet, musician, and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins) with Dr Guy Cuthbertson (Liverpool Hope University). In 2019, she co-chaired the International Women and/in Musical Leadership Conference with Prof Helen Julia Minors (York St John University). She is currently PI on the AHRC-funded Women's Musical Leadership Online Network: Women’s Musical Leadership Online Project (WMLOP) | Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (open.ac.uk).