In 2008 I joined the faculty of Duquesne University’s Mary Pappert School of Music, where I currently serve as Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Musicianship Department (musicology, music history, music theory, aural skills). As a musicologist and music historian as well a classical pianist, I believe passionately in a close and productive relationship between musical scholarship, the art of performance, and the transformative potential of musical experience to cross the boundaries of past and present, novice and expert, individual and society. When I’m researching, writing, performing, teaching, or sharing ideas inside and outside the academy, what drives me is the desire to unlock my own creative musical imagination as well as those with whom I collaborate.

My work on German Romantic music, art song, and classical music performance has been published in Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Current Musicology, Music Theory Online, and in edited volumes from Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Routledge. I’m particularly proud of the script I wrote for Thomas Hampson's Song: Mirror of the World public radio series which has been broadcast nationwide on the WFMT Radio Network (click here to listen). In general, my research and teaching interests include European music and culture of the long nineteenth century, German Romanticism, art song, the intersection of criticism, analysis, and performance, interdisciplinary performance studies, and creative forms of audience engagement and concert design in classical music.

As a pianist, I have been a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and a participant in the Cleveland Institute of Music Art Song Festival. As artistic and general director of the Pittsburgh Song Collaborative, I regularly presented and performed in innovative song recitals throughout the Pittsburgh area and beyond, including collaborations with the Carnegie Museum of Art, Andy Warhol Museum, and City of Asylum. I recently toured a solo recital program of the complete Brahms Klavierstücke opp. 116-119 at universities in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and California, and I regularly perform on Duquesne’s Music on the Bluff chamber music series.

From 2010-14, working together with pianist and vocal coach Cameron Stowe of the New England Conservatory, I was the director and co-founder of the Vancouver International Song Institute's Song Scholarship and Performance program at the University of British Columbia (click here for more information), a unique song workshop and summer course for performers, musicologists, theorists, and literary scholars. The program brought together groups of students and professionals (including scholars Susan Youens, Jane Brown, Richard Kramer, Kristina Muxfeldt, Michael Musgrave, Harald Krebs, Sharon Krebs, Deborah Stein, Jennifer Ronyak, and Sherry Lee, and performers Graham Johnson, Thomas Allen, Ann Murray, and Margo Garrett) to encourage cross-disciplinary approaches in the study of song.

I hold a master's degree in piano performance from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in musicology from Princeton University.