Sarah Collins

Biography

Sarah Collins is Professor of Musicology, Deputy Head of School (Research) and Chair of Musicology at the University of Western Australia Conservatorium of Music. She has published widely on the relationship between music aesthetics and broader intellectual and political currents in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Sarah is the author of Lateness and Modernism: Untimely Ideas about Music, Literature and Politics in Interwar Britain (Cambridge UP, 2019), and The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott (Boydell, 2013); editor of Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject (Cambridge UP, 2019); and co-editor with Paul Watt and Michael Allis of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford UP, 2020).

Sarah has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and Durham University, and has received competitive research funding from a range of sources including the Australian Research Council, the British Academy, and the European Commission.

Sarah is currently co-editor of Oxford University Press journal Music & Letters, and a member of the National Committee of the Musicological Society of Australia. In 2019, she was awarded the McCredie Musicological Award from the Australian Academy of the Humanities, which recognises outstanding contribution in musicology by an Australian scholar. It is Australia’s most prestigious award for the study of music. In 2024 Sarah become just the second Australian to win the prestigious Dent Medal, which recognises a significant contribution to the discipline of musicology on an international scale, in the history of the prize.