Florence Dore is a rock star English professor

A week before Halloween, Carolina English professor Florence Dore released a new single, “Signs of Life,” on music streaming services.

Recorded in the early days of the pandemic, the song has an eerie, brooding sound perfect for late October. Adding to the mood is the spellbinding violin music played by Libby Rodenbough of Mipso, a Chapel Hill-bred quartet that averages nearly a million monthly listeners on Spotify.

Rodenbough’s inclusion on Dore’s song is fitting, considering she was once one of Dore’s students at Carolina.

A professor of English and comparative literature in the College of Arts and Sciences, Dore is the rare professor by day and rock musician by night — and she’s a star in both worlds. Earlier this year, Dore earned a UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching, and her 2022 studio album “Highways and Rocketships” drew praise in Americana circles.

Dore, 55, has linked literature and music in the classroom and in two books, “Novel Sounds: Southern Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll” (2018) and “The Ink in the Grooves: Conversations on Literature and Rock ’n’ Roll” (2022).

Dore believes in the power of the humanities to connect people and promote civil discourse. She likes to challenge her audiences and her students.

“I believe that the essence of critical interaction and civil discourse is intellectual exchange, and that that’s a fundamentally creative endeavor,” Dore said. “I’m a Socratic teacher. I call on students because I expect them all to be ready for class discussion, and it’s my job to make the conversation balanced among all the people in the room.”

A Carolina faculty member since 2010, Dore teaches courses on American modernism, Southern literature and William Faulkner, who featured in her 1999 dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley.

In recent years, Dore started teaching a creative writing course on songwriting, which combines two of her most fervent passions. The class ends with students recording their own music at a local studio.

“By the grace of the creative writing program, I’m allowed to teach it, and it has turned into just a fantastic course,” Dore said. “It’s really different because I’m an authority and an expert in Faulkner and American fiction, but nobody’s an authority in songwriting. We’re all just kind of students of the song in a certain way in the class.

“I’m very much teaching the class and setting the exercises. But in terms of who’s writing the best song, it could be anybody, right? A mechanic or a Ph.D. — or a student or a teacher — can write a great song.”

Music, as much as literature, runs through Dore’s veins.

She released her first album, “Perfect City,” in 2001. Two decades later, after raising a daughter with drummer husband Will Rigby (of rock band The dB’s), Dore released “Highways and Rocketships,” and she’s putting the finishing touches on her third album, “Hold the Spark.”

Over 2022-23, Dore launched “Ink in the Grooves Live” — a unique public humanities tour in support of both her album and most recent book. Dore said she came back from that “Rock ’n’ Roll Sabbatical” feeling reinvigorated in the classroom.

The same holds true for her excellence in teaching award.

“It’s a huge honor,” Dore said. “It’s a beautiful recognition and an affirmation of something that I value very deeply. It invigorated me, sure, to go on the road. But this award also invigorated me to keep trying to get better and to just keep making the classroom an exciting place for the students to be.”