Dr Michelle Meinhart, Programme Leader MMus and Diplomas, Research Supervisor, and Reader in Musicology and Cultural History, hosted the first workshop for her research project, Hearing Maternity: Forging Critical Intersections in Music and Motherhood Studies.
The Hearing Maternity project aims to establish Music and Motherhood Studies as a new interdisciplinary field. Bringing together researchers from across the UK, Canada and Europe, the project explores how music shapes and reflects maternal experience, develops new feminist and intersectional research methods, and builds an international collaborative network that will generate scholarly resources and future research.
Hosted at Trinity Laban in July 2026, the two-day workshop featured shared readings, discussion of a draft Handbook of Music and Motherhood Studies, participant position papers and collaborative reflection. The event was designed to identify key research questions, refine emerging ideas and establish future collaborations.
The workshop brought together academics from a range of leading institutions, including: Dr Michelle Meinhart, Professor Christina Baade, Dr Karen Leistra-Jones, Dr Erin Johnson-Williams, Dr Laura Watson, Dr Maria Ryan, Dr L. Gre, Professor Roe-min Kok, Professor Charity Marsh, Professor Christina Scharff and Professor Jacqueline Warwick.
Over the two days the participants explored six interconnected themes: activism, experience, everyday life, representations, mothers as musicians and creative practice. Through discussion and collaboration participants laid the foundations for an international field of Music and Motherhood Studies.
Michelle Meinhart commented: “Motherhood touches so many aspects of musical life, from everyday acts of care to the conditions in which musicians create and work. At a time when maternity care, reproductive choices and bodily autonomy are fiercely debated, these connections deserve closer attention. Hearing Maternity explores what music and sound reveal about diverse reproductive lives, including choosing whether to have children and circumstances beyond individual choice. We want to understand the sonic complexities of mothering: its creativity, pleasure and connection, but also its labour, ambivalence, exhaustion and loss.
It was a pleasure to welcome this international group of scholars to Trinity Laban and to begin this work together with such openness, care and energy. Our discussions laid the groundwork for a collaborative handbook and a wider conversation through a follow-on conference at McMaster University, podcasts and public talks. This work also informs my monograph project, Sounding Modern Motherhood, which explores how music and sound have shaped maternal lives in England since 1750, bringing historical research into dialogue with present-day experiences. Together, these projects seek to bring often-overlooked experiences into both music scholarship and public conversations about motherhood, care and reproductive choice.”
The Hearing Maternity project and workshop were made possible by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, with support from the Research and Knowledge Exchange Department at Trinity Laban.
Find out more about the research project here.