Musicology
sspeller@fas.harvard.edu
Sara V Speller (she/they) is a doctoral student in historical musicology at Harvard University. Her research interests concern the epistemology of music, with a primary focus on the aesthetics, pedagogy, and historiography of “Western art-music” from the late-19th century onward. She looks at ways to interrogate the institutional biases and rigidities buried within presiding narratives of music analysis and pedagogy, and how these narratives may or may not (actively) enforce supremacist ideology. More specifically, she is interested in approaches that refigure Western art-music composers and their works as case studies within the material and political world of their times, which allows for experimental historiography, including but not limited to contextual music analyses that situate ‘standard canon composers’ as “the Other”. Sara received her BA in Music from Yale University, as well as an MSt (Honors) and MPhil in Musicology from St. John’s College, University of Oxford.