Alumni Chair in Humanities

The Alumni Chair in Humanities provides leadership in establishing the humanities in the curriculum and in the broader intellectual life of the community. It assists other humanities faculty in developing interdisciplinary courses; organizes humanities symposia; conducts research in the humanities; manages the humanities library fund; and maintains a visible presence for the humanities on campus.

Music Professor Samuel Dorf began his four-year tenure as Alumni Chair in Humanities in August 2023. Dorf is a musicologist and dance historian who works with classical texts and modern reception of the ancient world. His book Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi: 1890-1933 examines the interaction among scientists, humanities scholars, and artists as they performed and reinvented ancient Greek music and dance in turn-of-the-20th century Paris and Delphi. A new book project moves away from fin-de-siècle Paris as he explores the modern performance of very ancient music from the Stone Age to ancient Greece.

Dorf’s goals as Alumni Chair include helping faculty, staff, and students communicate their humanities scholarship to public audiences; hosting an annual symposium focusing on local public humanities projects; and communicating the value of the humanities to internal and external audiences. In addition, he plans to facilitate interdisciplinary exchange across the humanities in research and teaching.

The previous seven chairs are Eugene August (English), Michael Barnes (religious studies), Richard Benedum (music), John Heitmann (history), Patricia A. Johnson (philosophy), and Ellen L. Fleischmann (history), and Julius A. Amin (History).

Each chair has traditionally chosen to focus a large part of her or his endeavors on a broad-ranging theme that is of critical interest to the University community.