Sarah Koval

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music (Musicology)

• Faculty
• Instructor

• Email:

  sjkoval@olemiss.edu

• Office Location:

  Music Building

• Phone:

  662-915-7268

Dr. Sarah Koval is Visiting Assistant Professor of musicology at the University of Mississippi.

Research Interests

Sarah’s research focuses on musical practices of everyday life, especially in the context of early modern Europe, with methodological commitments to material culture, the history of science, sound studies, and book history. Her current book project, tentatively titled Performing Wellness: Music, Health, and the Household in in Early Modern England, is a cultural history of music’s medicinal use in routines of bodily, spiritual, and household care in early modern England. Building on her dissertation, this project takes stock of the personal music collections of individuals and households across England who gathered tunes alongside recipes for plague cures and pie, purchased printed song anthologies touting musical cures, and made music in daily rituals of household and bodily maintenance. With a rich and previously under-examined archival collection of music gathered in English recipe books, this project considers not only these books’ contents, but how they were read and used, the status of the music notation within them, and how disciplinary boundaries have partitioned their diverse musical, medicinal, and nutritional contents. A second book project, Psalms for the Poor: Music and Civic Good in England’s Hospitals, Prisons, and Orphanages, 1550–1750, charts the development of music-making by and for London’s charitable institutions in the long seventeenth century, investigating the entanglements of music and benevolent causes, widespread fantasies of social “harmony,” and the working musicians excluded from music’s social and physical benefits. Her research has been supported by fellowships from Harvard University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Biography

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Mississippi, she was a Graduate Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and degrees in musicology and English literature from the University of Toronto and Queen’s University, Canada. Sarah serves as media manager of the AMS Notation, Inscription, and Visualization Study Group.

Publications

“Soundscapes of Wellness: Music in an Early Modern English Recipe Book.” Early Modern Women 17, 1 (2022), 97–107. , Sarah Koval and Taryn Dubois.

Can Opera Listen? Canada’s (Sesqui)Centennial Opera, Louis Riel” University of Toronto Quarterly 87, 4 (Fall 2018): 59–72.

"A Recipe for Music: Notating Domestic Singing in Seventeenth-Century England,” blog post on The Recipes Project, edited by Amanda E. Herbert and Annette Herbert, February 18, 2021.

Riel Opera Talk, C150-funded scholarly podcast series on the 2017 Canadian Opera Company production of Louis Riel for Canada’s sesquicentennial celebrations, January–April 2017.

Courses Taught

• Mus 101 Introduction to Music Literature
• Mus 301 History of Music I
• Mus 302 History of Music II
• Mus 520 Intro to Music Research

• Office, Department or Center

  Department of Music

• School

  College of Liberal Arts

• Campuses

  Oxford