Robert Hodson is Chair of the Department of Music and Professor of music theory and jazz.

He holds a Ph.D in music theory from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has also earned Bachelor's and Master's of Music degrees in piano performance from Hope College and Michigan State University.

Prior to joining the Hope College faculty in 2002, Dr. Hodson held positions at the State University of New York at Binghamton and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

An active scholar, Professor Hodson has presented research at many regional, national, and international conferences, including those of the International Association for Jazz Education, the Society for Music Theory, the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, the College Music Society, and many others.

His book Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz (Routledge, 2007), draws upon semiotics, linguistics, and phenomenology—as well as more traditional music-theoretic models—to explore the interactive processes that occur between simultaneously-improvising jazz musicians and the effects that these interactions have on the individual musician's improvisations. It has received positive reviews in a variety of journals including Jazz Research Journal, Psychology of Music, Notes, and Jazz UK. Professor Hodson is also involved in international education at Hope College as co-leader of the off-campus Japan May Term and served as the Hope College Visiting Exchange Professor at Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo in Fall 2008.

In 2010, Professor Hodson and a team of four students were awarded a $26,000 ASIANetwork Freeman Foundation Faculty/Student Collaborative Research Fellowship, which funded a 3-week trip to explore, participate in, and document the Tokyo jazz scene. Read more about this project on the ASIANetwork website and in News from Hope College.