Laura Moore Pruett holds the M.M. in musicology with a certificate in early music from the Florida State University (FSU) and a  Ph. D. in historical musicology at FSU with a dissertation titled “Aesthetic Interactions: Louis Moreau Gottschalk and John Sullivan Dwight and an Emerging American Musical Culture, 1853-1865.”  Pruett is from Lafayette, Louisiana, and received her Bachelor of Arts with a concentration in Vocal Performance from Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. She sang with the FSU Renaissance a cappella vocal group Cantores Musicae Antiquae for five years, and also performed Neapolitan and other Italian folk music with L'Orchestra Italien.

Pruett has presented papers at regional and national meetings of the College Music Society, the American Musicological Society, and the Society for American Music. Pruett is currently the Campus Representative for FSU to the CMS and Student Representative for the Southern Chapter of the AMS. She is also co-chair of the Student Forum for SAM.  Pruett’s publications include an article, “Dohnányi’s American Rhapsody, Op. 47: An Émigré’s Tribute to the New World,” in a forthcoming collection entitled Perspectives on Ernst von Dohnányi (Scarecrow Press).

At Florida State University Pruett has taught courses in Sight-Singing and Ear Training, Music History I and II, Music Literature, and music history for non-music majors.  Her research interests include American music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, music and culture, philosophy of music, and music criticism.