Office Location: Sloan 107
Office Hours: MWF 3:00-5:00 or by appointment
Email: rofenimore@davidson.edu
Phone: 704-894-2591

B.A. (music), Davidson College
M.A. (musicology), University of California, Los Angeles
Ph.D. (musicology), University of California, Los Angeles

Courses Taught:
WRI 101: Musical Anxieties and Social Change
MUS 122: Music of the United States
MUS 328: Music History II (after 1800)
MUS 401: Senior Seminar, “Musical Cultures of the 1980s”

Ross J. Fenimore returns to his alma mater after completing his PhD in musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He specializes in the cultural criticism of music with an emphasis on popular music and interdisciplinary methods of research and teaching. More broadly, his courses examine how Western art music and popular music interpret modes of identity such as race, nationality, gender, and sexuality.

He is author of the chapter “Voices That Lie Within: The Heard and Unheard in Psycho” in Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear (Routledge) and co-author, with Susan McClary, of the Madonna essay in the Grove Dictionary of American Music (Oxford, 2013). He is revising his dissertation, “Madonna’s Confession: Sound, Self, and Survival in a Love Song,” into a book that examines subjectivity, sexuality, and narrative in the songs of Madonna. He was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Formerly a Vail music scholar at Davidson, he continues to play the viola with cheer, and is especially fond of chamber music. Of the many Angeleno traits he adopted, yoga remains his favorite.