He completed his Ph.D. in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music at the University of Virginia in 2011. Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Musicological Society, his dissertation (“Equal to All Alike”: A Cultural History of the Viol Consort in England, c.1550- 1675) explores the social nature of amateur chamber music for viol consort. The project investigates how consort music shaped understandings of social intimacy, the nature and propriety of the passions, and the relationship between language and music. In addition to his work on early modern musical culture, Loren has research interests in African American music as well as the twentieth-century history of performance practice. Loren is currently researching the history of the “Yankee” viol and in the early nineteenth-century development of American vernacular music.