Martha Sprigge

Martha Sprigge is an Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and currently chairs the Student Engagement Committee. Her research focuses on musical expressions of mourning, grief, and loss in Germany and Eastern Europe post-1945, exploring how music served as an alternative to language in responding to political and cultural upheavals caused by WWII and the Cold War. She holds a PhD in Music History and Theory from the University of Chicago (2013) and a Bachelor of Music from the University of Toronto (2006). Prior to UCSB, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan’s Society of Fellows, cross-appointed in the Department of German and the School of Music.

Dr. Sprigge’s scholarly contributions include Socialist Laments: Musical Mourning in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford University Press, 2021), which examines commemorative practices in East Germany. Her research also extends to musical widowhood and the intersection of gender with archival practices in 20th-century European art music history. She teaches undergraduate courses on music history within cultural contexts and graduate interdisciplinary seminars on topics like music and trauma, cultural memory, and death studies. She is an affiliate faculty member in UCSB’s Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies.

Her publications appear in Twentieth-Century Music, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and edited volumes such as Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic and Dreams of Germany. Current research explores gendered archival practices and their impact on music historiography.