Sponsor
Music
Lecture Series
Alana Mailes Musicology Lecture
Friday, March 27,
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Speaker(s): Alana Mailes
The Sound of Second Sight: Music, Mysticism, and the Making of St. Hugh's College, Oxford
Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain are most remembered as the co-authors of a 1911 bestseller, An Adventure, in which they claimed to have time-slipped back to pre-revolutionary Versailles. Both were self-avowed seers yet rejected séance-table spiritualism. Recent research has recovered their roles as educators and scholars central to the founding of St. Hugh's College, Oxford, where they served as the first two principals in 1886-1924. One significant aspect of their lives, however, has remained unexamined: both were highly musical, which profoundly shaped their professional, personal, and spiritual worlds. Students were mesmerized by Moberly's apocalyptic divinity lectures in the dim glow of her sitting room, which would brighten into a salon for musical soirées and a rehearsal space for choirs and strings. Students were enchanted, too, by Jourdain's piano performances of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century repertoires-one piece allegedly learned in a childhood dream-and the sound of her music floating down the corridors. At such events, both principals also related their past psychic experiences.
These recollections depict an early women's college built not only on administrative labor and scholarly rationalism but also on a shared musical imagination in which pedagogy, religious occultism, and relational intimacy converged. Drawing on sources such as biographies, scrapbooks, college publications, student reminiscences, and personal correspondences, I offer a microhistorical reconstruction of musical life in this supernaturally charged academic community. I engage scholarship on Anglican mysticism, Bergsonian intuitionism, and feminist and queer affective approaches to historical listening to explore how music enabled alternative modes of leadership largely unavailable within official university channels. I argue that sacralized musical sound was a vital medium through which Moberly and Jourdain asserted authority and developed St. Hugh's into a cohesive, legitimized educational institution.
Alana Mailes is a musicologist, cultural historian, and classical singer. She is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Southern California and holds a PhD in Historical Musicology from Harvard University. Her book on Jesuit musical theatre at the Venerable English College, Rome, was published in 2025 by Cambridge Elements.
Free and open to the public.
Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain are most remembered as the co-authors of a 1911 bestseller, An Adventure, in which they claimed to have time-slipped back to pre-revolutionary Versailles. Both were self-avowed seers yet rejected séance-table spiritualism. Recent research has recovered their roles as educators and scholars central to the founding of St. Hugh's College, Oxford, where they served as the first two principals in 1886-1924. One significant aspect of their lives, however, has remained unexamined: both were highly musical, which profoundly shaped their professional, personal, and spiritual worlds. Students were mesmerized by Moberly's apocalyptic divinity lectures in the dim glow of her sitting room, which would brighten into a salon for musical soirées and a rehearsal space for choirs and strings. Students were enchanted, too, by Jourdain's piano performances of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century repertoires-one piece allegedly learned in a childhood dream-and the sound of her music floating down the corridors. At such events, both principals also related their past psychic experiences.
These recollections depict an early women's college built not only on administrative labor and scholarly rationalism but also on a shared musical imagination in which pedagogy, religious occultism, and relational intimacy converged. Drawing on sources such as biographies, scrapbooks, college publications, student reminiscences, and personal correspondences, I offer a microhistorical reconstruction of musical life in this supernaturally charged academic community. I engage scholarship on Anglican mysticism, Bergsonian intuitionism, and feminist and queer affective approaches to historical listening to explore how music enabled alternative modes of leadership largely unavailable within official university channels. I argue that sacralized musical sound was a vital medium through which Moberly and Jourdain asserted authority and developed St. Hugh's into a cohesive, legitimized educational institution.
Alana Mailes is a musicologist, cultural historian, and classical singer. She is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Southern California and holds a PhD in Historical Musicology from Harvard University. Her book on Jesuit musical theatre at the Venerable English College, Rome, was published in 2025 by Cambridge Elements.
Free and open to the public.
