Dr. Molly C. Doran is an Assistant Professor of Music at Wartburg College, where she teaches a wide variety of courses ranging from music history surveys to ethnomusicology to women in music. During her time at Wartburg, she has committed herself to curriculum improvement initiatives, including reimagining the research component of the junior and senior recitals to better address the professional goals of her students and leading various committees in the development of a new, campus-wide general education program. A community-minded scholar, she has served as chair of the program committee for the annual Iowa Musicology Day since 2023, planning traditional research panels and facilitating pedagogy workshops and discussions. Dr. Doran’s current research considers issues of ethics, trauma, performance, and gender in twenty-first-century opera productions. Her past work examines representations of women’s suffering in nineteenth-century French opera, combining critical analytical approaches from musicology, performance studies, and trauma studies to demonstrate how operatic performance communicates collective and individual suffering and can signify forms of witness bearing.

Dr. Doran regularly presents research at internationally recognized conferences including the Transnational Opera Studies Conference and the conference of the American Musicological Society. She recently published an article on maternal trauma in productions of Gounod’s Faust in Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. She has a number of other projects forthcoming or in progress, including an essay for the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Music, Sound, and Trauma Studies, a co-written entry on operatic arias for Oxford Bibliographies, and a colloquy on trauma studies and music for JAMS. Her work has been supported by numerous awards, including a prestigious Chateaubriand Fellowship to support research in Paris. Dr. Doran currently lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa with her husband Nathan and her children Vivienne and Jack.