Steve Swayne

Steve Swayne serves as the Jacob H. Strauss 1922 Professor of Music at Dartmouth College and Director of the Montgomery Fellows Program. His academic journey includes degrees from Occidental College (BA), Fuller Theological Seminary (M.Div.), and the University of California at Berkeley (MA, PhD). His research spans American music, musical theater, and opera, with two acclaimed books: "How Sondheim Found His Sound" (2005) and "Orpheus in Manhattan" (2011), the latter winning the 2012 ASCAP Nicolas Slonimsky Award. As President of the American Musicological Society (2020-2022), he led the organization through the pandemic years, earning an honorary membership in 2024. His contributions to music education and research have been recognized through fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the 2017 Professor John Rassias Faculty Award. Beyond academia, he maintains an active career as a concert pianist, having performed with the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas