Jayme Kurland is a Ph.D. candidate in History at George Mason University, where she focuses on 20th century cultural history, specializing in the contributions of women to musical instrument manufacturing and performance. Her dissertation, “Instrumental Women of Fender” will examine the roles women played at the Fender electric instrument factory in Orange County, CA. A digital historian, Kurland founded the digital history project Instrumental Women in 2020, which explores the essential roles women have played in the histories of musical instrument manufacturing.
Jayme has been the recipient of several pre-doctoral fellowships at major museums. In 2026-2027, she will be a fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum for American History. From 2024-2025, she was awarded the Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Kurland 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. She received her BA in Music History at the University of Oregon, and her MA in Music History at Arizona State University.
During her Ph.D. studies at GMU, she has worked as a graduate research assistant on the NEH-funded project Hearing the Americas at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. As a graduate research assistant GMU’s Center for Mason Legacies and the Data and Digital Scholarship Services at GMU Libraries, she curated the exhibit “A County of Contrasts: Fairfax County in the Age of Suburbanization”, and contributed content to the Mason Family Account Book project.
In academia, Jayme has been an invited speaker for undergraduate and graduate level courses, and taught the course “Music and World Cultures” as an adjunct professor at GMU (2018-2020). In the 2026-2027 academic year, she served as an advisor for a Capstone Senior Design Project which Department of Engineering on a project aimed at making packable percussion instruments.
Kurland has served in leadership roles for the American Musical Instrument Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Organology Special Interest Group. She is also an active member of the International Committee of Museums section, ICOM-Music on music and musical instrument collections.
