The Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University has appointed Ryan Dohoney to a new position as associate dean for faculty, effective September 1, 2025.

Dohoney is presently professor of musicology and director of graduate music studies at the Bienen School, where he has served on the faculty since 2013. He is also an affiliated faculty member with Northwestern’s interdisciplinary clusters in critical theory, global avant-garde and modernist studies, and gender and sexuality studies.

In this new role on the Bienen School’s Leadership team, Dohoney will work directly under Dean Jonathan Bailey Holland to provide broad support for faculty affairs, including faculty development, curricular development, interdisciplinary initiatives, academic program review, faculty search processes and onboarding, and various faculty governance needs. He will continue to teach at least one course during the academic year as a tenured faculty member.

“Ryan’s unique combination of interests, from research, to performance, to creative activity, combined with his relationships and connections across both the school and the University, will benefit all of us at the Bienen School as he steps into this new role,” said Dean Holland.

Dohoney’s research interests include musical modernism and experimentalism, interdisciplinary artistic collaboration, philosophies of voice, and the ethnography of music collectives. He is the author of Saving Abstraction: Morton Feldman, the de Menils, and the Rothko Chapel (Oxford, 2019) and Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). Along with his work on Feldman, Dohoney has published on the music of Julius Eastman, Joan La Barbara, and Meredith Monk. He also writes on the intersection of music and philosophy.

Prior to his appointment at the Bienen School, Dohoney held faculty positions at the University of Kansas, Colby College, and Montclair State University. In fall 2020 he served as visiting associate professor at the University of Chicago. He holds a BM in music history and vocal performance from Rice University and MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees in musicology from Columbia University.