Marian Wilson Kimber is a scholar of music in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her research has explored issues surrounding biography, gender, compositional process, musical reception, and concert life. Her publications have centered on Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, spoken-word performance, women composers, and women’s roles in American music. 

Wilson Kimber’s first book, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word, was the recipient of the Society for American Music’s H. Earle Johnson Publication Subvention, as well as a subvention from the American Musicological Society’s 75 PAYS Endowment, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. Bringing her research into historical combinations of elocution and music to life, Wilson Kimber and pianist Natalie Landowski, performing as the duo Red Vespa, have delighted audiences with comic musical recitations since 2017. Wilson Kimber’s second book, Clubwomen Activists and the Making of American Music, forthcoming from University of Illinois Press, reveals the influence of women’s clubs on the musical repertoire heard across the United States before World War II.

Wilson Kimber received her PhD from Florida State University with a dissertation on the autograph sources of Felix Mendelssohn’s works for solo piano and orchestra. Her publications include research into anti-Semitism in Mendelssohn reception, appearing in The Mendelssohns: Their Music in History and Mendelssohn Perspectives. Her study of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s piano cycle, Das Jahr, appeared in The Journal of Musicological Research, and her article in 19th-Century Music, “The Suppression of Fanny Mendelssohn: Rethinking Feminist Biography,” is widely cited. As part of the international celebrations surrounding the two-hundredth anniversary of Felix Mendelssohn’s birth, Wilson Kimber was a keynote speaker for a conference held at Seoul University under the auspices of four Korean universities and at Ewha Womans University. 

Wilson Kimber has presented multiple papers at meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and elsewhere. Currently the editor of the Journal of the Society for American Music, she has also served on the Society’s board and as program chair for its 2020 conference. She is a frequent writer and speaker on musical topics, and is a contributor to the blog, Women’s Song Forum. A faculty member at the University of Iowa since 2004, Wilson Kimber has taught a variety of courses, including Women Making Music, African Americans in Classical Music, Performance in the Nineteenth Century, and Music in the World of Jane Austen. In 2011, she was selected to give the Master Teacher Lecture at the meeting of the American Musicological Society.