Dr. Saylor is Associate Professor of Music History at Drake. He received a bachelor's degree in Violin Performance from Drake University, an M.A. in Musicology from Arizona State University, and a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Michigan. He also served for a period as editorial assistant to Hugh Cobbe on Letters of Ralph Vaughan Williams 1895-1958, recently published by Oxford University Press.

Dr. Saylor's area of specialization is British art music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing particularly on the life and works of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Frederick Delius. His research has been published in the Journal of Royal Musical Association, The Musical Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and Musik-Konzepte, and he has presented at national conferences of the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the North American British Music Studies Association, as well as for the International Conference on Music Since 1900 (University of York), the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference (Durham University), and the International Congress on Musical Signification (Université de Paris). He is co-editor and contributor to Blackness in Opera, an essay collection forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press, and has written a chapter on Vaughan William's dramatic works for the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Ralph Vaughan Williams. He is also the author of the Vaughan Williams entry in Oxford Bibliographies Online, and is a contributor to the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of American Music.

Dr. Saylor has received serveral grants and awards, including the 2004 Outstanding Teacher of the Year award from Drake's College of Arts and Sciences. His other areas of interest include pastoralism, historiography, intersections of music and politics, and shape-note hymnody. He currently serves as a board member for the North American British Music Studies Association.