Dr. Samuel N. Dorf has taught in the Department of Music at the University of Dayton since 2010. He is an innovative teacher, committed to experiential learning in the musicology classroom and to public musicology for the community. He takes his teaching and mentorship responsibilities very seriously. As a scholar, performer and ensemble director he believes that the music history classroom should be a space to listen, play, and experiment with familiar and unfamiliar repertoires. Dorf has an engaging and energetic teaching style that challenges all students to explore questions of music historiography, performance practice, social justice, and aesthetics.
He has previously served as the Acting Executive Director of the University Honors Program at the University of Dayton as well as an Associate Director of the Honors Program where he directed the Honors Thesis process, ran the Berry Summer Thesis Institute, and the Honors Student Symposium, and advocated for undergraduate research across campus.
He has written about his teaching for the American Musicological Society’s blog, Musicology Now, here.
Read recent profiles of his teaching below:
“Learning and Singing from the Source (January 2025)
“Music Speaks Volumes” (May 2023)
COURSES TAUGHT
University of Dayton
Music 205: Music, Technology, and Culture
Music 301: Understanding Music in the West
Music 302: Ethics and American Popular Music
Music 309: Opera Seminar
Music 315: Music and Gender
Music 327: Music in Film
Music 330: Faith Traditions in Early Music
Music 501: Graduate Musicology Seminar
Music 390-30: Gamelan Ensemble (Co-Director)
Music 390-31: Early Music Ensemble (Director)
University of Victoria
Fine Arts 100: The Creative Being (Developed curriculum, team-taught, and worked with Faculty of Fine Arts Dean’s office to administer new required interdisciplinary course on theories of creativity).
Northwestern University
General Music 175: Music as Multimedia (Non-majors course)
General Music 230: Masterpieces of Opera (Non-majors course)
Musicology 400: Graduate Music History Review (for Doctor of Music students).
Samuel N. Dorf, PhD 