Eleanor Smith-Guido

Eleanor Smith-Guido is a musicologist, organologist, and occasional soprano specialising in the history, construction, and material culture of keyboard instruments. She completed her doctorate on the claviorgan in 2013, helping to establish the instrument’s historical significance within European musical culture and bringing renewed scholarly attention to hybrid keyboard instruments and their repertories.

She has nearly twenty years’ experience working with musical instrument museums, collections, and historical keyboard instruments. Her research combines organology, archival study, and performance practice, with particular interests in keyboard culture, organ building, and the transmission of craft knowledge in early modern and eighteenth-century Europe. Recent work has focused on archives relating to historical Swedish organs and organ building.

Eleanor is currently Associate Researcher at the University of Gothenburg on the ERC-funded Rem@ke project, where she contributes to and helps coordinate organological research relating to the wider Stein microecology, exploring networks of makers, materials, instruments, and technical knowledge surrounding the Stein family and their broader cultural environment.

She teaches a master’s-level course on the history of keyboard instrument construction to conservation students in Cremona, Italy, and since 2025 has served as joint editor of The Organ Yearbook alongside Massimiliano Guido.