Office: 230 Presser
Phone: 513/529-8367
E-mail: vandera3@muohio.edu

Ann Ommen van der Merwe teaches courses in music history and appreciation, including those focused on classical music, jazz, and American music. She holds a BM in voice performance from the University of Illinois and the MA and PhD degrees in musicology from The Ohio State University.

She began her musical career as a singer and dancer in regional theatre. Among her professional credits are a national tour of Anything Goes, summer stock productions of Into the Woods, Chicago, and A Chorus Line, and regional productions of Showboat and Sugar Babies.

As a musicologist, her research focuses on musical theatre and popular song. She is an active member of the Society for American Music and the American Musicological Society, a contributor to the forthcoming second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music, and author of the The Ziegfeld Follies: A History in Song (Scarecrow Press, 2009). Her latest publication is the article “Music, the Musical, and Postmodernism in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge” (Music and the Moving Image, Fall 2010).