Dr. Cheryl Tan

Biography

Cheryl Tan is a pianist, fortepianist, researcher, and lecturer whose work focuses on keyboard culture of the long nineteenth century. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from Cornell University, where she studied historical performance practice and completed a dissertation entitled 'Clara Wieck and her Piano Variations: Postclassical Pianism of the 1830s'. She previously studied in Britain, graduating from the University of Oxford with First Class and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama with Distinction. Cheryl joined Trinity College Dublin as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in September 2025. Her project, `Revisiting Clara Wieck(-Schumann): Virtuosity, Identity, and Lost Repertory', explores the postclassical milieu at the intersection of performance, analysis, and historical-cultural study. She has also taught across performance and academic disciplines, having held positions across Britain at the Universities of Southampton, Bristol, and Oxford, as well as at Cornell University in the United States. Cheryl has presented papers, recitals, and lecture-recitals internationally on both modern and historical pianos; her research has appeared in Nineteenth-Century Music Review. Shaped by her experiences as a pianist and scholar, her research into lost pianistic traditions and the works of women composers seeks to bring scholarship and practice into mutually illuminating dialogue.