The purpose of the study was to uncover what is often-invisible to students and members of other disciplines, the social, cultural, political, and historical issues that form the basis of a particular discipline with which they are interacting or seeking to engage in common projects. The overarching research questions were to examine: 1) How and in what ways did the faculty member, as instructor, provide opportunities for students, in her History of Opera course, to engage in creating a disciplinary understanding, and thus a form of disciplinary self? and 2) What kinds of professional opportunities (e.g. course, interdisciplinary conference, and monograph) did the musicologist provide students (i.e., graduate and undergraduate) as well as me (as ethnographer), that enabled us to extend our understandings of what constituted professional selves beyond the teaching of a course? Drawing on interactional ethnography (Green, Dixon & Zaharlick 2003), this study examines a series of analyses of the musicologist's approach to instruction in this non-majors' course, her writing for professionals in her field, and her work with doctoral students in other contexts, and the history of the development of the Department in relationship to the development of the university itself. Each of these analyses constitutes four telling cases (Mitchell, 1984) or sequence of events from which the analyst seeks to make some theoretical inference. The events entail a social organization of a community, family, or individual. Through examining four contexts, the Professor made visible what counted as musicology.