Dr. Amy E. Zigler serves as Associate Professor of Music and Graduate Music Admissions Coordinator in the School of Music at Salem College, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate music history, research methods, piano literature, and courses on women in music. Her research specializes in music of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a focus on the cultural study of chamber music, the social history of music in Germany and Great Britain, and the study of gender and sexuality in music.
Dr. Zigler has presented papers internationally, nationally, and regionally, including the 2021 Third International Women’s Work in Music conference at Bangor University in Wales; the 2020 Musical Women in Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century conference at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England; the 2018 Centennial Reflections on Women’s Suffrage and the Art conference at the University of Surrey, England; the 2016 Nineteenth-Century Programme Music Symposium in Lucca, Italy; the 2008 Performing Romantic Music: Theory and Practice conference in Durham, England; the 33rd Annual 19th Century Studies Association conference, and multiple presentations at the North American British Music Studies Association bi-annual conferences. Her article “’What a Splendid Chance Missed!’: Dame Ethel Smyth’s Der Wald at the Met” was published in The Opera Journal in December of 2021. Her chapter “‘You and I will be like the monk Dante meets in hell’: Literary References and Autobiography in Smyth’s Sonata in A minor for violin and piano, op. 7 (1887),” was published in the collection Nineteenth-Century Programme Music, edited by Jonathan Kregor (Brepols 2019). Dr. Zigler has also been published in the Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music as well as the Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy website.
She holds a doctorate in music history and literature from the University of Florida, where she was a Graduate Alumni Fellow; her dissertation explored the intersection between biography and style in the chamber works of Dame Ethel Smyth. Dr. Zigler holds degrees in Piano Performance from Belmont University (M.M.) and the University of Alabama (B.M., magna cum laude), and she continues to perform as a soloist and collaborative pianist. In addition to her formal education, Dr. Zigler studied piano at the Landesmusikakademie in Heek, Germany; she received a certificate in 20th century British history from the University of Cambridge; and she received the Certificate in Injury-Preventive Keyboard Technique from Salem College. She is currently a member of the College Music Society, the American Musicological Society, the North American British Music Studies Association, the International Smyth Society, and the International Alliance for Women in Music. Dr. Zigler served on the American Musicological Society Committee on Women and Gender, and was a board member for musicology in the College Music Society Mid-Atlantic chapter.
Amy Zigler, PhD 