Biography

Sarah Eyerly, lecturer in musicology, holds a PhD in musicology from the University of California, Davis, and a MM in historical performance practices from the Mannes College of Music. As a Fulbright Fellow to the Netherlands, she studied historical performance practices, including baroque rhetoric, gesture, and ornamentation at the Royal Conservatory, The Hague. Her research (supported by the American Musicological Society, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the Consortium for Women and Research, and competitive fellowships from the University of California) explores the close relationship between the art of memory, literacy, and improvisation, as represented by archival records from the eighteenth-century German and American utopian communes of the Moravian church. She is currently working on a book manuscript, "Utopia Improvised: the Heavenly Lotteries of the Moravian Church," which details the literate practice of Moravian improvisers, and incorporates recent research in neurophysiology and neuropsychology linking the patterns and information ordering utilized by improvisers to structural patterning in the human brain. Her chapter on memory and improvisation will be published in 2009 by the Lehigh University Press in an edited volume on educational traditions in early America. She is currently writing an article on the pedagogical link between memory and music in the educational curricula of the Jansenist academies of Port-Royal and Moravian schools in Germany and the colonies. She has presented papers at the national meetings of the American Musicological Society and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Newberry Library, Moravian College, and the University of California, Los Angeles, among others. She has previously taught at UCLA, and is currently appointed as a visiting scholar with UCLA's Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

Professional Experience

Current Professional Affiliation(s):
Visiting Scholar, UCLA, Center for Seventeeth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2008-2009
Lecturer in Musicology, UCLA, 2007-2008

Academic Degrees

• PhD, University of California, Davis, 2007
• MA, University of California, Davis, 2004; MM, Mannes College of Music, 1998
• BA, Pennsylvania State University, 1996

Other Academic Experience:
Post-graduate studies in historical performance, Royal Conservatory, The Hague, The Netherlands