Raymond Knapp

Raymond Knapp is Distinguished Professor of Musicology, Disability Studies, and Humanities, and is currently serving as Interim Chair of UCLA’s Interdepartmental Degree Program in Disability Studies, whose major he helped launch in 2024. The inaugural director of the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities, he has also served The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music as its first academic associate dean.

Knapp has a broad interest in classical and contemporary music, and has authored five books, including The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (2005, winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism) and, most recently, Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism (2018). He is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of the Television Musical with Jessica Sternfeld and Holley Replogle-Wong, and a collection of essays on Music and Disability in Disney’s Animated Features with colleagues Jenny Olivia Johnson, Jessica Schwartz, and Holley Replogle-Wong. At UCLA since 1989, Knapp is well known for his commitment to undergraduate education, having chaired the Academic Senate’s Undergraduate Council, General Education Governance Committee, College Faculty Executive Committee, and WASC Reaccreditation Steering Committee. Among his campus awards are the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, Membership in the UCLA Faculty Mentoring Honorary Society, and his selection to deliver the 138th Faculty Research Lecturer (April 2025).