Yugoslavia-born violinist Tatjana Goldberg is currently in the final year of a PhD at City University London, supervised by Ian Pace. She has been chosen to participate in the first of this year’s university-run 3minute thesis competition (3MT) on 27^th March 2014.

The competition was originally devised at the University of Queensland, Australia to encourage research students to develop their communication skills in order to explain the essence of their research to a non-specialist audience using non-technical language.

Tatjana’s research is about women violinists of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, with a particular focus on the careers of three artists: British violinist Marie Hall, Australian-born Alma Moodie and American Maud Powell. Many accounts of the development of Western violin playing focus almost entirely upon male virtuosi and the achievements of important female violinists are often neglected or forgotten. Tatjana’s research assesses the significance of these three pioneer violinists in the development of the solo recital, and also considers their contribution to the history of early recordings and their role in promoting contemporary works of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Since musical patriarchy still exists to some extent, she maintains that many of the issues that affected these and other women musicians continue to require rigorous interrogation.

After receiving her MA at the Moscow Conservatoire, Tatjana Goldberg performed widely as a soloist and as second leader of the Orchestra Sinfonica Brasileira. She started her PhD at City University in 2010 and was the recipient of the 2013 Mercers’ Award for her performance of the Wieniawski Violin Concerto with the City University Symphony Orchestra at LSO St Luke’s in 2013.