Dr Sarah Fuchs

PhD, MMus, BMus

Area Leader in History

Dr Sarah Fuchs is Area Leader in Musicology.

Sarah writes mainly about operatic culture, audio-visual media, and archival practices over the past century. Her first monograph, Operatic Artifacts: Finding Early Sound Recordings in French Archives, is forthcoming (University of Rochester Press). In this book, she investigates sound recordings made by singers from the fin-de-siècle French operatic world—and the hidden histories of preservation that shape how these extraordinary recordings are heard today.

Her journal articles and book chapters include studies of the singers Emma Calvé, Jeanne Hatto, and Giovanni Battista Velluti, a survey of how emerging sound technologies affected fin-de-siècle French operatic listening practices (co-authored with Hervé Lacombe), and a reflection on using network visualization tools to analyze relationships between the Paris Conservatoire’s voice professors and pupils c. 1900. Her research has been supported by funding from (among others) the Music & Letters Trust, the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust, and Universities UK International.

Sarah previously worked at Syracuse University, where she was Assistant Professor of Music History & Cultures (2016–22) as well as Director of the Integrated Learning Major in Digital Humanities and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music History & Cultures. In 2019, she was awarded Syracuse University’s Meredith Teaching Recognition Award.

Sarah received her PhD in musicology from the Eastman School of Music, where she won the Eastman School of Music’s Teaching Assistant Prize and the University of Rochester’s Edward Peck Curtis Award. Prior to this, she trained as a pianist at Ball State University (MMus 2010) and Taylor University (BMus 2007).

Selected publications

Fuchs S (forthcoming), Operatic Artifacts: Finding Early Sound Recordings in French Archives, University of Rochester Press.

Fuchs S & Gouzi A (2025), Contextualising the wax cylinder recordings of the Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets de Paris, Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on the History of Speech Communication Research (pp. 157–166), TUD Press []

Fuchs S (2023), Emma Calvé: a diva’s campagne de propagande, in M Irvine and K Francis (eds.), Creative Women of the ‘Lost Generation’: Women in the Arts in the Wake of the Great War (pp. 109–123), Routledge [].

Fuchs S & Lacombe H (2022), Le tournant technologique de l’écoute: 1870–1914, in H Lacombe (ed.), Histoire de l’opéra française Vol. 3: De la Belle Epoque au Monde Globalisé (pp. 62–69), Fayard [].

Fuchs S (2020), Seeing more clearly, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 18 (1: Special Issue: The Digital Humanities and Nineteenth-Century Music), 109-120 [].

Fuchs S (2019), The castrato as creator: Velluti’s voice in the London sheet-music market, in R Parker and S Rutherford (eds.), London Voices, 1820–1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories (pp. 71–91), University of Chicago Press [].

Fuchs S (2018), Animating antiquity in the Vision animée, Cambridge Opera Journal, 30 (2-3: Special Issue: Prima Donnas and Leading Men on the French Stage), 115–137 [].

Faculties / departments: Research, Academic staff