Benjamin Dobbs is Assistant Professor of Music and Coordinator of Music Theory and Composition at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. He holds a Ph.D. (2015) in music theory, with a related field in music history, from the University of North Texas, where he served on faculty as Visiting Lecturer in Music Theory during the 2015-2016 year. Benjamin is an active scholar, pedagogue, and performer.

As a music theorist and music historian, Dr. Dobbs’s research interests center broadly on the development of musical style and musical thought during the Protestant Reformation in Middle and North Germany, and include analytical methods for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century repertoires, the emergence of harmonic theory and its integration with contrapuntal practice and composition pedagogy, and the impact of the Thirty Years’ War on European musical cultures. His research has been supported by grants from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service), the American Friends of the Herzog August Bibliothek, and UNT’s Toulouse Graduate School. He has presented at conferences throughout the United States, Germany, Austria, and Canada, and has published articles and reviews in Musiktheorie, Renaissance Quarterly, Theoria, Harmonia, and the Lexikon des Orchesters. 

He also studies the relationships among students’ beliefs about learning, learning behaviors, and learning outcomes in music theory classes, for which he collaborates with Dr. Shana Southard-Dobbs, Associate Professor of Psychology at Lander University and UNT alumna (Ph.D. 2016, Experimental Psychology).

An avid performer, Dr. Dobbs sings baritone in the Greenville Chorale, the Herring Chamber Ensemble, and the choir at Episcopal Church of the Resurrection (Greenwood, SC), where he occasionally serves as cantor, conductor, and substitute organist. Outside of music, he enjoys running, hiking, cooking, baking, and going on walks with his dog, Tannhäuser (the world’s smallest Wagnerian).