Stephen Shearon is associate professor of musicology and coordinator of graduate studies in the music department at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. Professor Shearon teaches many of the department's music-history courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, for both majors and nonmajors, and contributes to curriculum development. Shearon's research interests include Italian and German vocal music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, western art music of the twentieth century, and American music of all types. He has presented papers in the United States, Spain, Great Britain and Italy, and his publications include articles on both Neapolitan sacred music of the early eighteenth century and the southern American shape-note tradition. In 1997, he served as president of the South-Central Chapter of the American Musicological Society and hosted their annual meeting. He is currently working on a modem edition of the memoirs, originally published in 1729, of Bonifacio Pecorone, an abbot and singer in the Neapolitan Royal Chapel.

Prior to coming to MTSU, Shearon was a visiting assistant professor at St. Andrews College in Laurinburg, North Carolina, and held temporary posts and graduate assistantships at North Carolina State University, the Duke University Chapel, and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Shearon received his Bachelor of Music degree in music theory and composition from Northwestern University and completed the M.A. and Ph.D. in musicology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with studies on the choirs of Johann Sebastian Bach and sacred music in early eighteenth-century Naples, respectively.