Sam Reenan (PhD) joined the faculty at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, as Assistant Professor and Area Coordinator of Music Theory in Fall 2021. He previously served as Lecturer in Music at Hamilton College.

Reenan is a dedicated educator and teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses across all stages of the music the theory curriculum. A proponent of the teacher-scholar model, he has been a participant in programs including the Advancing Teacher Scholars faculty learning community (2023–2024), the Howe Faculty Fellows program (Spring 2023), and the New Faculty Teaching Enhancement Program (Fall 2021).

Issues of symphonic thought, generic mixture, large-scale form, and narrative figure prominently in Reenan’s research program. His principal research project, provisionally titled Structure and Spectacle: Form and Genre in the Hybrid Twentieth-Century Symphony examines these issues across a range of Germanic, American, and British symphonic works. His writings are published or forthcoming in Music Theory Spectrum (2024), Music Theory Online (2022, 2016), Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, and Music & Letters, while his dissertation focuses on the music of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Arnold Schoenberg. This research has also appeared at several major conferences (Society for Music Theory, 2018, 2020; Music Theory Southeast 2020; International Conference on Musical Form 2021; Music Theory Society of New York State 2021). Reenan has presented spoken papers at international, national, and regional conferences on a range of topics including theoretical approaches to sonata form in Mahler’s late symphonies and Strauss’s tone poems; pitch, memory, and timbre in Henri Dutilleux’s music (Music Theory Society of New York State & Ninth European Music Analysis Conference, 2017; Music Theory Midwest 2021); T. W. Adorno’s analytical aesthetics (Music Theory Midwest, 2019); graduate instructor peer observation (Pedagogy into Practice, 2019); and commercial jingles (Society for American Music, 2020). His 2020 presentation at the Music Theory Southeast conference, titled “The ‘Rondo’ and the ‘Burleske’ in Mahler’s Rondo-Burleske,” was awarded the Irna Priore Prize for Graduate Student Research. 

Reenan is a co-organizer of the Composers of Color Resource Project and a member-at-large on the Society for American Music’s Education Committee. He served as editorial assistant with Music Theory Online from 2017–2021 and is a past co-editor of Intégral, where he led the journal’s transition to an online, open-access format. He is currently the Web Manager for the Music Theory Society of New York State.

Reenan holds an MA and PhD in music theory from the Eastman School of Music and degrees in music theory and biological sciences from the University of Connecticut.