Sarah McCleave completed a PhD dissertation in musicology at King’s College London in 1993. Her final year of study was funded in part by the O’Brien Foundation. McCleave is the current Director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at Queen's University Belfast. In 2010, she was appointed a co-editor of the Society for Theatre Research's journal, Theatre Notebook. She continues to develop her interests in theatrical dance of the long eighteenth century through published work which calls on disciplines as varied as source studies, reception history, textual criticism, musical analysis, and gender studies. In 2013, University of Rochester Press published her twice-AHRB funded monograph, Dance in Handel’s London. In October 2012 she appeared as an invited speaker for the project 'Les Arts Vivants au prisme du genre' (Paris), and was a keynote speaker for 'Plays, Places, and Participants,' at the Norwegian University for Science and Technology, Trondheim, November 2013. She is also a New Grove contributor, and has published in Dance Research, Music and Letters, The Consort, the Göttinger Handel-Beiträge, and the Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia; her work has also appeared in anthologies issued by the University of Wisconsin Press, Bulzoni Editore, and ARACNE Editrice. She is a founding member of Irish RISM and was a Council member for the Society of Musicology in Ireland (2003-2006). McCleave is twice the recipient of the Society for Theatre Research’s “Anthony Denning” award (1992, 2012). She has acted as a peer reviewer for Music and Letters, the AHRC, SSHRCC, and also the IRCHSS. She served on the committee for the JISC project awarded to the Department of Music, Cardiff University (2011-12). McCleave also has an interest in Thomas Moore (1779-1852), and developing online resources related to the Gibson-Massie Moore Collection at Queen's.