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Samuel N. Dorf, Ph.D. is a teacher, scholar, artist, parent, husband, advocate and friend. He currently serves as Acting Executive Director of the University Honors Program and Professor of Music at the University of Dayton. In 2025, he will begin an appointment as the Alumni Endowed Chair in the Humanities. Sam has enjoyed learning from and with his students and colleagues at the University of Dayton since 2010. As a scholar, he often writes on the continual performance and reinvention of music and dance from the ancient world and the complex relationship between scholars and their objects of study. He wishes he could play the viola da gamba better and vows to keep practicing. He was honored to serve as President of the Academic Senate at UD from 2021 to 2023. In 2023 he was awarded the College of Arts and Sciences Award for Outstanding Service. He currently serves as the Treasurer of the American Musicological Society, and sits on the boards of the Dayton Performance Arts Alliance and the Anti-Defamation League’s Cleveland Office. Being a husband and a dad is still his favorite role.

Faculty perspective

• Rebecca Sutton, “Music Speaks Volumes,” Dayton Magazine, May 2023
• Thomas Columbus, “They Came, They Saw, They Stayed,” Dayton Magazine, December 2023

Research interests

His current research interests include the performance of ancient music today, the history of musical historically-informed performance practice, music and dance relations and the intersections of music and culinary historiography.

Courses taught

• MUS 301: Understanding Music History in the West
• MUS 302: Ethics and American Popular Music
• MUS 315: Music, Gender, and Sexuality
• MUS 330: Faith Traditions and Early Music
• MUS 390: Early Music Ensemble

Selected publications

“Capturing Ancient Greece in Modern France.” In Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900-1939. Edited by Robyn Asleson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024.

“Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in America’s Midwest.” American Music 39, no. 4 (Winter 2021): 409-427.

Anthology to Accompany Gateways to Understanding Music. Edited by Samuel N. Dorf, Heather MacLachlan and Julia Randel. New York: Routledge, 2021.

“Ancient Mesopotamian Music, the Politics of Reconstruction, and Extreme Early Music,” Open Access Musicology 1 (2020): 31-59. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12063224

Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890-1930. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

“Eva Palmer-Sikelianos Dances Aeschylus: The Politics of Historical Reenactment When Staging the Rites of the Past.” Choros: International Dance Journal 5 (Spring 2016): 1-11.

“The Classroom and Public Musicology,” Musicology Now, Official Blog of the American Musicological Society, 16 December 2015, http://musicologynow.ams-net.org/2015/12/bringing-public-musicology-in-classroom.html.

“Eroticizing Antiquity: Madame Mariquita, Régina Badet and the Dance of the Exotic Greeks from Stage to Popular Press.” In Opera, Exoticism and Visual Culture. Edited by Hyunseon Lee and Naomi Segal. Bern, Oxford, and New York: Peter Lang, 2015.

“Staging Antiquity.” guest introduced and edited, Opera Quarterly 29, no. 2 (Spring 2013).

"Dancing Greek Antiquity in Public and Private: Isadora Duncan's Early Patronage in Paris." Dance Research Journal 44, no. 1 (2012): 2-27.

Book review of Nijinsky's Bloomsbury Ballet: Reconstruction of the Dance & Design for Jeux, by Millicent Hodson (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2010) and Stravinsky's Pulcinella: A Facsimile of the Sources and Sketches, by Maureen A. Carr (Middletown, WI: A-R Editions, 2008), in The Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 1 (Spring, 2012): 276-288.

"Seeing Sappho in Paris: Operatic and Choreographic Adaptations of Sapphic Lives and Myths." Music and Art: International Journal for Music Iconography 38 (2009): 289-308.

"Étrange n'est-ce pas? The Princesse Edmond de Polignac, Erik Satie's Socrate, and a Lesbian Aesthetic of Music?" French Literature Series 34 (2007): 87-99.