About me

Dr Sara Salloum, PhD (Durham University)

I am a professional performing musician of Renaissance plucked string instruments, and a music scholar interested in female musicians principally from the early modern period. My AHRC-funded doctoral work (completed Oct 2024) investigated the lute performance practices of gentry women in early seventeenth-century England. It did so through the analysis of material culture from the period (visual art, clothing, literature), manuscripts of lute tablature, which I read fluently, and, at the core of my project, a practice-based methodology through which I utilised and developed my own performance practice. This culminated in several innovative and varied creative performance outputs which ranged from videos of myself performing the lute in accurately reconstructed period clothing and an album of lute music sourced from the female-owned early seventeenth-century manuscript known as the ‘Margaret Board lute book’, to an original electroacoustic ‘sound-work’. My doctoral work was highly original in its use of such a methodology, demonstrating the value and validity of this approach: several of my discoveries, such as the sympathetic relationship between the clothing of a gentry woman, her music table, and her lute technique, would not have been possible without the adoption of a practice-based approach. Furthermore, the creative outputs (films, sound recordings, images, etc) have proved to be instrumental in the continued communication, dissemination and impact of my research. Already, my research has formed the basis for a workshop in partnership with the Lute Society UK, part of an undergraduate module at Newcastle University, and a chapter of the upcoming Routledge volume Identity and Agency: Women as Artists and Musicians in the Early Modern World, ed. Eve Straussman-Pflanzer and Elizabeth Weinfeild – all substantially based on the practice-based elements of my research.