Kathleen McGowan is a musicologist-who-performs, arts journalist, writer, and pedagogue who studies the historical roles and activities of women making music. Her Ph.D. research investigates women’s musicking at Girton College, Cambridge in the broader context of late 19th and early 20th century Britain. Her other work includes women’s music writing/criticism in the British periodical press, feminist data practices in the digital humanities, and promoting the work of historically overlooked women in music. 

Her writing has appeared in Women & Music, Feminist in the Concert Hall, and I Care If You Listen. She holds an M.M. in Musicology from UIUC (2022), for which she wrote a thesis on women writing about music in the British press from 1890–1914. She also holds performance degrees in Trombone from the UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance (MM) and Western Illinois University (BM).

"But, in the end, who cares? (More than one student has asked me this.) "I listen to the music that I like because I like it and how it makes me feel, not because I’m making a moral choice every time,” they argue. “It’s not that deep.” Circular reasoning aside, it is that deep — and deeper. To be unaware of those values, to reduce music to something that signals your lifestyle and nothing more is to ignore yourself and to potentially misunderstand your own beliefs. In contemporary society, to disengage from your own beliefs is to invite someone else to decide what they are for you." 
– From "The Ethics of a Personal Canon: Resisting the Lifestyle-ification of Music" (I Care If You Listen, Aug 2021)