Pheaross Graham, PhD

Pheaross Graham is Assistant Professor of Music at Rollins College, where his primary field is musicology. He teaches courses in music history, research, and music in global contexts. He previously spent three years as a Mellon Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center while also serving as a lecturer in the Department of Music at Stanford University. As a musicologist and active pianist, Dr. Graham studies performers and interpretation through historical and cultural research, embodied practice, and analytic micro-listening, with particular interest in how performers construct artistic identities and musical meaning. His publications on Sergei Rachmaninoff bring together historical recordings, religion, pianistic emulation, and acting theory, while his book project on Florida-born Jamaican American pianist Donald Shirley examines how Shirley navigated racialized entertainment typecasting and the boundaries between popular and classical music in the mid-twentieth-century United States. His other work, including publications in press and forthcoming, ranges from Liberace and entertainment culture to musical metaphor.

A dedicated teacher, Dr. Graham has taught for more than 30 academic terms across subjects ranging from Western concert music and opera to African American music, electronic dance music, rock, musical theater, 1960s American music, performers’ musicology, applied piano (with Taubman-influenced approaches to biomechanics and coordinated movement), and writing about music. His work as a researcher with UCLA’s Excellence in Pedagogy and Innovative Classrooms (EPIC) program helped shape his approach to course design and teaching. At Stanford, he developed courses including Reading Recorded Performances, Theorizing Blackness in Film and Music, and 19th-Century Pianism, and revised and taught Music History Since 1830, a core course, over multiple terms.

His honors include two UCLA Dean’s Medals, recognizing distinguished teaching and general academic distinction, and the Cota-Robles Fellowship, among other awards. He regularly presents his research at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society and at international conferences. Dr. Graham has also presented his research in invited musicology speaker series and colloquia at Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Indiana University. He has also co-curated UCLA’s Music Performance Studies Today conference series.

Education

BA, Music, and BS, Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley
MFA, Piano Performance, University of California, Irvine
MA, CPhil, and PhD, Musicology, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)