About

Jayme Kurland is currently a third-year Ph.D. student in History at George Mason University. She has dedicated her career to curatorial and collections management work within collections of musical instruments and music materials, at institutions including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Phoenix’s Musical Instrument Museum, and Georgetown University’s Special Collections and Archives. A historian of the 20th-century United States, Kurland specializes in music history and women’s labor history. She received her BA in Music History at the University of Oregon, and her MA in Music History at Arizona State University. 

Kurland is a digital historian who has worked on history projects and exhibitions. At GMU, she has worked as a research assistant on the NEH-funded project Hearing the Americas at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, as well as the Mason Family Account Book project, which is part of the GMU’s Center for Mason Legacies. In 2020, Kurland founded the digital history project Instrumental Women explores the essential roles women have played in the histories of musical instrument manufacturing.

Jayme is an elected board member of the American Musical Instrument Society (AMIS) and chairs their ethnomusicology working group. As a member of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), she founded and co-chairs the Organology Special Interest Group, and serves as the official AMIS liaison to SEM. Jayme is also a member of the International Committee of Museums, and ICOM’S subcommittee CIMCIM, which focuses on musical instrument collections.

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