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headshot of Sarah Gerk

Sarah Gerk

Associate Professor of Musicology; Director of Undergraduate Studies

Music
FA 30

Background

Sarah Gerk is an associate professor of musicology in the Music Department. She researches the role of immigration and diaspora in 19th-century U.S. Music, with a special interest in the Irish and Haitian diasporas. She has also investigated issues of colonialism, race, class, gender and national identity in all kinds of music-making in the 19th century. Her research has been supported by a number of organizations, including the American Antiquarian Society and the Society for American Music.

Publications

  • Music in a Nation of Immigrants: US Musical Practice and Irish Diaspora in the Nineteenth Century. Approved and slated for Spring 2026 release by University of Illinois Press, Music and American Life Series.
  • Awarded publication subventions by the American Musicological Society and the Society for American Music.
  • “Approaching Music and Trauma in Pre-20th-Century Histories,” with Molly Doran and Mary Ellen Ryan. Colloquy on Music & Trauma, edited by Maria Cizmick and Jillian Roders. Journal of the American Musicological Society 77, no. 2 (Summer 2024).
  • “Songs of Famine and War: Irish Famine Memory in the Music of the U.S. Civil War,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 20, no. 1 (April 2023).
  • “Irish Melodies in the United States,” in The Reputations of Thomas Moore, edited by Sarah McCleave and Tríona O’Hanlon. Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution. New York: Routledge, 2019.
  • “Common Joys, Sorrows, Adventures, and Struggles: Transnational Encounters in Amy Beach’s ‘Gaelic’ Symphony,” Journal of the Society for American Music 10, no. 2 (May 2016).
  • “Gendering Place: Alice Cooper’s Motor City Move,” in Heavy Metal, Gender, and Sexuality: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Florian Heesch and Niall Scott, Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series, Routledge, 2016.

Education

  • PhD in historical musicology, University of Michigan
  • MA in musicology, California State University
  • BM in clarinet performance, University of Delaware

Research Interests

  • Music and Diaspora
  • Trauma
  • Postcolonial theory
  • Race, class, gender, and national identity
  • Classical, popular, and traditional music-making

Research Profile