Erin E. Bauer, Ph.D. is an academic leader, teacher, and scholar committed to building institutions where people and ideas can thrive. She serves as Dean of Arts, Culture, & Society at Arapahoe Community College (ACC) in Littleton, Colorado, where she leads academic programs across the arts, humanities, and social and behavioral sciences.
Her leadership focuses on strengthening teaching and learning, supporting faculty innovation, building connected academic communities, and creating pathways between education and meaningful work. She is particularly interested in how colleges can respond thoughtfully to a changing world through authentic and applied learning, emerging technologies, stronger community and workforce partnerships, and better use of evidence to understand and improve student success. Across this work, she believes lasting institutional change begins with people: bringing faculty, staff, students, and community partners together around shared questions and giving them the conditions to build solutions together.
Teaching and learning have been the through-line of Dr. Bauer’s career. Over more than two decades, she has taught mathematics, physics, music, and the humanities in K-12 schools, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and universities. Her work in faculty development has focused on culturally responsive and inclusive teaching, student engagement, online and blended learning, instructional technology, assessment, and evidence-informed pedagogy. As a leader, she is interested in how institutions can preserve the depth and rigor of disciplinary learning while continually improving the ways students engage with, apply, demonstrate, and articulate what they know.
Dr. Bauer is also an active scholar of music, identity, and globalization. She is the author of Flaco’s Legacy: The Globalization of Conjunto (University of Illinois Press, 2023), which traces the international circulation of Texas-Mexican accordion music and explores questions of migration, identity, hybridity, and cultural appropriation. Her scholarship has also examined Latinx/Chicanx musical traditions, music and social movements, disability, popular music, and early modern music history. Her work appears in American Music, Latino Studies, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Latin American Music Review, Rock Music Studies, and other scholarly publications, and has received national recognition from the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Before joining ACC, Dr. Bauer served as Chair of Art & Design and Music and Associate Professor of Musicology at Muskingum University. She previously held faculty appointments at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Laramie County Community College. Earlier in her career, she spent a decade teaching in public secondary schools in Texas and California, beginning as a Teach For America corps member on the Texas-Mexico border. She holds bachelor’s degrees in music and physics from Colorado College and a master's and Ph.D. in musicology from Claremont Graduate University.
Her leadership focuses on strengthening teaching and learning, supporting faculty innovation, building connected academic communities, and creating pathways between education and meaningful work. She is particularly interested in how colleges can respond thoughtfully to a changing world through authentic and applied learning, emerging technologies, stronger community and workforce partnerships, and better use of evidence to understand and improve student success. Across this work, she believes lasting institutional change begins with people: bringing faculty, staff, students, and community partners together around shared questions and giving them the conditions to build solutions together.
Teaching and learning have been the through-line of Dr. Bauer’s career. Over more than two decades, she has taught mathematics, physics, music, and the humanities in K-12 schools, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and universities. Her work in faculty development has focused on culturally responsive and inclusive teaching, student engagement, online and blended learning, instructional technology, assessment, and evidence-informed pedagogy. As a leader, she is interested in how institutions can preserve the depth and rigor of disciplinary learning while continually improving the ways students engage with, apply, demonstrate, and articulate what they know.
Dr. Bauer is also an active scholar of music, identity, and globalization. She is the author of Flaco’s Legacy: The Globalization of Conjunto (University of Illinois Press, 2023), which traces the international circulation of Texas-Mexican accordion music and explores questions of migration, identity, hybridity, and cultural appropriation. Her scholarship has also examined Latinx/Chicanx musical traditions, music and social movements, disability, popular music, and early modern music history. Her work appears in American Music, Latino Studies, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Latin American Music Review, Rock Music Studies, and other scholarly publications, and has received national recognition from the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Before joining ACC, Dr. Bauer served as Chair of Art & Design and Music and Associate Professor of Musicology at Muskingum University. She previously held faculty appointments at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Laramie County Community College. Earlier in her career, she spent a decade teaching in public secondary schools in Texas and California, beginning as a Teach For America corps member on the Texas-Mexico border. She holds bachelor’s degrees in music and physics from Colorado College and a master's and Ph.D. in musicology from Claremont Graduate University.