Eric Sayloris Professor of Music History at Drake and a specialist on British art music of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where his primary areas of study include the life and works of Ralph Vaughan Williams and topics in English pastoral music. He received a bachelor's degree in Violin Performance from Drake University, an M.A. in Musicology from Arizona State University, and a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Michigan.
Dr. Saylor is the author of Vaughan Williams(Oxford University Press, 2022),named a 2022 Book of the Year by the Presto Music Awards and theFinancial Times,andEnglish Pastoral Music: From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900–1955(University of Illinois Press, 2017). He is also the co-editor, with Christopher Scheer, ofThe Sea in the British Musical Imagination(The Boydell Press, 2015) and ofBlackness in Opera, with Naomi André and Karen M. Bryan (University of Illinois Press, 2012). He has also written chapters forThe Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams (Cambridge University Press, 2013),Vaughan Williams and His World(University of Chicago Press, 2023), and multiple essays for Cambridge University Press’s Composers In Contextseries (including for volumes dedicated toVaughan Williams,Benjamin Britten, and a forthcoming one on Elizabeth Maconchy).Additionally, he has contributed to prominent music reference sources— including Oxford Bibliographies Online, the second edition of theNew Grove Dictionary of American Music(Oxford University Press, 2013), and the British Library’sDiscovering Musicportal—and to leading periodicals such as theJournal of the Royal Musical Association,The Musical Quarterly, andMusik-Konzepte.
Dr. Saylor has received several honors and awards, including Outstanding Teacher of the Year from Drake's College of Arts and Sciences (2004), the Drake Humanities Research Scholar award (2018–21), and was named Drake University’s Luther M. Stalnaker Lecturer in 2024. A visiting research fellow at Merton College Oxford in 2019, he served as President of the North American British Music Studies Association (NABMSA) from 2016 until 2020, and currently holds the post of Series Editor for Clemson University Press’sStudies in British Musical Culturesseries. His other areas of scholarly interest include historiography, intersections of music and politics, and shape-note hymnody.
