Sara Gulgas

Sara Gulgas is a musicologist whose research interests include popular music studies, film and media studies, memory studies, and the sociology of music. She earned a B.A. in Music History from Youngstown State University and an M.A. in Popular Music Studies from the University of Liverpool. She completed her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Pittsburgh, where she earned fellowships to conduct research at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archives. Before coming to the University of Arizona, she taught courses on the Beatles, beginning piano, and western art music at the University of Pittsburgh as well as Students Motivated by the Arts.

She is currently working on a scholarly monograph entitled Baroque Rock and the Memory Politics of Musically Representing the Past, a study of baroque rock’s sonic representations of a distant past through the blending of string quartets and harpsichords with rock instrumentation in the 1960s. She has presented at national and international conferences such as the International Association of Popular Music, Society for Ethnomusicology, Society for American Music, Music & the Moving Image, Song, Stage, & Screen, Popular Culture Association, and the Music & Screen Media Conference. She will present her current research as a part of the American Musicological Society-Rock Hall Lecture Series. Her work has been published in IASPM-US Music Scenes, Resonance Interdisciplinary Music Journal, Bruce Springsteen and Popular Music: Essays on Rhetoric, Social Consciousness, and Contemporary Culture, and Heavy Metal at the Movies.