Jane Ginsborg

Professor Jane Ginsborg read music at the University of York and studied singing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Following a successful career as a singer, she graduated in psychology from the Open University, and undertook her ESRC-funded doctoral research at Keele University under the supervision of John Sloboda. During this period she won a British Psychological Society award to study with Anders Ericsson at Florida State University. In 2002 she won the British Voice Association’s Van Lawrence Award for her research on singers’ memorizing strategies. Between 1999 and 2005, when she started working at RNCM, she taught psychology at the University of Manchester and Leeds Metropolitan (now Beckett) University, and was a post-doctoral research fellow at Sheffield University; there, she contributed to and edited a book on language and social disadvantage (Clegg & Ginsborg, 2006). She taught developmental psychology for the Open University for 14 years. Her AHRC-funded project “Interactive performance for musicians with a hearing impairment” (in collaboration with the University of Liverpool) was shortlisted for a THE Best Research Project (2013) and she was Principal Investigator for the “Better Practice” strand of the Conservatoires UK-wide AHRC-funded Musical Impact project (2014-2018), which sought to promote healthy lifestyles and practice for musicians from the earliest years throughout their education and training and into the profession. In addition to her research, supervision and teaching, Jane is much in demand as a speaker. She was Orion Visitor at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, in February 2023, where she gave several lectures, and in the last year she has also spoken at the University of Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London. She regularly gives keynote lectures; is often asked to review articles, books, book proposals and grants; and is currently Editor-in-Chief of Musicae Scientiae.

• Social and cognitive processes
• Memorization of music and, specifically, the words and music of songs
• Musicians’ health and wellbeing
• Older musicians and those involved in supporting musicians’ transition from the music profession into retirement
• Research methods, e.g., observational and experimental methods

Jane is currently involved in several collaborative research projects. One, with Dr Susanna Cohen (Bar-Ilan University, Israel), follows up a study of the experiences of self-employed freelance orchestral musicians during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022), and focuses on the experiences of older professional musicians and their transition into retirement, with the aim of making recommendations that can be implemented by employers, managers and promoters as well as musicians themselves. Another, with members of the Health Literacy Consortium, an international team of musicians, educators and researchers, follows up the construction, development and validation of the Musicians’ Health Literacy Questionnaire (MHL-Q19), which was designed specifically to measure health literacy for music performance. The purpose of the project, which is being conducted in Australia, is to improve the training of musicians for long and healthy careers.