Stephen Rumph teaches courses on eighteenth-century topics, opera, music and politics, film music, and semiotics. After studying voice at Oberlin Conservatory, he earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, writing a Beethoven dissertation with Joseph Kerman. He joined the UW School of Music faculty in 2002.

Rumph's book Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works (University of California Press, 2004) offers a political interpretation of late Beethoven illuminated by the writings of the German Romantics. His second book, Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics (University of California Press, 2011), pioneers a "historically-informed" semiotics of music, based upon eighteenth-century sign and language theory. He is currently writing a book on Gabriel Fauré's song cycles.

Rumph has published articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS), Journal of the Royal Music Association, Music and Letters, Beethoven Forum, 19th-Century Music, Eighteenth-Century Music, and Journal of Musicology, and has essays in the Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory and Cambridge Mozart Studies 2. He served as Reviews Editor for Beethoven Forum, 2005-2008.

Rumph also sings professionally as a lyric tenor, and has performed widely in concert, oratorio, and opera.  His resumé can be found at http://northwestartists.org.