Peter Graff

Peter Graff is a scholar of music and American popular culture of the nineteenth century to today. He holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Case Western Reserve University (2018) and joined the Denison University faculty in 2019. At Denison, he teaches a broad range of courses that build upon his scholarship and research interests, including courses on race and ethnicity, rock ‘n’ roll, country music, hip-hop, film music, and Broadway musicals.

Graff’s current book project, A Theater for Us: Ethnic Musical Theater in Cleveland, 1910–1930, is under contract with the University of Illinois Press and examines how ethnic and immigrant groups used music and the theater to navigate issues of identity in the 1910s and 1920s. His scholarship has appeared in American Music, Film History, Theatre History Studies, Grove Music Online, and others. In addition to his current monograph, he is in the early research stages on a subsequent project that explores the tensions between New York’s gay underground spaces and the musical mainstream during the 1980s.