Cheryl Tan is a pianist, fortepianist, researcher, and lecturer whose work explores keyboard culture of the long nineteenth century. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, working under the mentorship of Nicole Grimes. Her project, Revisiting Clara Wieck(-Schumann): Virtuosity, Identity, and Lost Repertory, explores the postclassical milieu (ca. 1820-40) at the intersection of performance, analysis, and historical-cultural study.

Cheryl holds a doctorate from Cornell University, where she studied historical performance practice and completed her dissertation, Clara Wieck and her Piano Variations: Postclassical Pianism of the 1830s, supervised by Xak Bjerken, Natasha Loges, Roger Moseley, and James Webster. Cheryl previously studied in Britain, graduating from the University of Oxford (BA) with First Class and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (MMus) with Distinction. Her principal piano teachers include Malcolm Bilson, Xak Bjerken, John Byrne, Victor Sangiorgio, and Michael Young.

Cheryl has 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. She 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, Cheryl’s research into lost pianistic traditions and the works of women composers seeks to bring scholarship and practice into mutually illuminating dialogue.