Erica Buurman

Erica Buurman
Music History, Beethoven Center
erica.buurman@sjsu.edu

Erica Buurman is Director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies and Associate Professor in the School of Music and Dance. She joined SJSU in the spring of 2019, having previously held a faculty position at Canterbury Christ Church University in the UK (2013–2019). She completed her doctorate at the University of Manchester, UK, in 2013, with a dissertation on Beethoven's compositional approach to the overarching forms of his instrumental works, focusing particularly on preliminary outline plans in the composer's sketchbooks.

Erica's research interests center on Beethoven and the musical world of early nineteenth-century Vienna. She held a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (UK) in 2017–2018 with a project on social dancing in Beethoven's Vienna, which resulted in a monograph, The Viennese Ballroom in the Age of Beethoven (Cambridge, 2021). Other recent publications include chapters in Vienna: A Musical History (Cambridge, 2026), Combining the Arts in Schubert’s Time (Vienna Schubert Studies, vol. 2, 2025), and The Cambridge Companion to the Eroica Symphony (Cambridge, 2020). She has contributed to radio broadcasts about Beethoven on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, including several episodes of the 125-part series Beethoven Unleashed, which was broadcast on BBC radio throughout 2020. Erica is editor of The Beethoven Journal and The Beethoven Newsletter.