I am a musicologist and cultural historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain with a special focus on the musical history of British abolitionism. My interdisciplinary approach stems from my M.A. in Eighteenth-Century Studies from the University of Southampton and my B.A. in Music and English from the College of the Holy Cross.

My Ph.D. dissertation from Columbia University, entitled “Political Songs in Polite Society: Singing about Africans in the Time of the British Abolition Movement, 1787 to 1807,” explored a set of scores whose textual and musical content critiqued Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. These scores were included in the music collections of British women from the era, and thus represent a variety of musical activities through which women promoted abolitionism from their homes.

I have presented my research in numerous contexts. In Spring 2021, I taught “Singing Against Slavery: Five Centuries of Resistance,” an undergraduate course at Columbia University on musical opposition to slavery in Britain and the United States from the seventeenth century to the present day. I have spoken at conferences in musicology and eighteenth-century studies, including the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I published an article entitled “‘African’ Songs and Women’s Abolitionism in the Home, 1787-1807” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (2021) and am currently working on a book project that traces the shifting musical approaches to British antislavery activism from the 1760s to the 1840s.

I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology at Ithaca College, where I teach music history courses for majors and non-majors. Please feel free to email me at jhamilton4@ithaca.edu.