(Photo by: Khadeeja Saleem)

Associate Professor Dr. David VanderHamm built his path to JCCC on a love of music, a curiosity about its cultural aspects, and an ability to ask questions.

His love for music came from his family. He picked up his dad’s guitar at 12 and told himself that he was going to get good. He was going to be a guitarist in a band. He was meant for greatness, and why not? His mom’s cousin was the original guitarist for the band Kansas, and he wrote “Dust in the Wind” and “Carry on Wayward Son.”

“Music was brought to me because of my family,” VanderHamm said. “I come from a family where there’s a lot of musicians and a lot of educators.”

While studying for his master’s in guitar performance at the University of Denver, he played freelance gigs to help cover his expenses. It was during this time that he started contemplating his next steps and what he wanted to do.

“So my plan at first was like, I was just going to be a guitar teacher. That was my plan,” Vanderhamm said.

After he decided he wanted to be a teacher, he found a program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to pursue a PhD in Musicology. Which, according to Dr. VanderHamm, used to be a very narrow field but has now expanded into a broader one.

“Once I got into that environment, partially because the faculty was so good, partially because my cohort, the people who came in with me were also so brilliant and so interesting,” VanderHamm said. “My strategic broadening then became sort of like just intellectual broadening where I was just like reading everything.”

This broadening sparked a curiosity about more than just the sound of music. It shifted his focus to the cultural and historical aspects of music.

“You do music a disservice if you pretend like it’s just this pure, separate sonic experience that doesn’t connect to any other aspects of humanity,” VanderHamm said.

Seeing music as a connection to humanity created a cultural context for music and its origins, and then opened his eyes to broader topics and interests.

“The story of my intellectual development was like, it was pretty easy for me to choose music performance as a 19 year old. I was like, ‘All I want to do is play guitar,’” VanderHamm said. “The list of things that I didn’t find at least somewhat interesting just got shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. The older I got, the more I read, the more I was exposed to things. I was like, ‘I guess, you know, that is kind of interesting.’”

He has always enjoyed thinking beyond music, which led him to teach humanities and mythology.

“I love teaching these interdisciplinary courses. The way that I teach classical mythology is different from how a classicist would teach it,” VanderHamm said.

Students agree because he teaches in a way that brings the course to life.

“Professor VanderHamm’s [class] was my favorite type of class that I’ve had because of his teaching style,” Jude Foster-Rojas, one of VanderHamm’s students, said. “While he does have a presentation format, he kind of just lets loose and has like an open conversation with us all about the topic, [he] kind of goes around and he’ll ask questions and all that type of stuff because it kind of feels more like a conversation than just a lecture.”

VanderHamm teaches a wide range of topics at JCCC, from Introduction to World Music, Introduction to Humanities, and Classical Mythology.

Ask him which class he enjoys teaching the most, and his answer may surprise you.

“The one with the most engaged students,” VanderHamm said.